MSNBC "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" - Transcript: "Biden regains polling advantage."
Interview
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O`DONNELL: You would think if Donald Trump was going to spend the weekend attacking a member of the House of Representatives, the chairman, it would be the chairman who has announced he is investigating the possible impeachment of the president. But that is not who Donald Trump chose to attack this weekend. He chose to attack one of the three chairmen of the three most important committees that are investigating Donald Trump in the Trump White House. Here they are at a press conference on Wednesday after Robert Mueller testified to the House Judiciary Committee and then the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Chairman Adam Schiff. Chairman Elijah Cummings was also at that press conference even though Robert Mueller did not testify to his committee that day, because Chairman Cummings is conducting multiple investigations of Donald Trump and the Trump administration and the House Oversight Committee. Chairman Cummings last week led a committee vote to authorize subpoenas for senior White House officials` communications via private email accounts and messaging applications, including the electronic communications of the president`s daughter and the president`s son-in-law who have been repeatedly using private email for government purposes for which Donald Trump and everyone supporting his campaign last time said Hillary Clinton should be locked up. That was the basis of their "lock her up" chant. Surely, Donald Trump does care about his daughter being exposed for doing a much worse version of what Hillary Clinton was accused of doing, by using private email for government communications. But Donald Trump cares much more about the possibility that he will be impeached. Still, he chose to spend the weekend attacking Elijah Cummings, not Jerry Nadler. The president fired off tweets about Chairman Cummings and his congressional district, calling it the worst congressional district in the country, without saying what "worst" means. What could it be about Elijah Cummings that makes Donald Trump want to spend the entire weekend attacking him? Why not Adam Schiff? Why not Jerry Nadler? What is it about Elijah Cummings? What could it possibly be? Leading off our discussion tonight is Democratic Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York. He is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for joining us again tonight.
NADLER: Thank you.
O`DONNELL: And let me just start with what we all saw the president do with Elijah Cummings this weekend in this tweet rant that went on and on. What is your interpretation of that?
NADLER: Well, my interpretation is it`s a racist and disgusting attack, and it was designed to whip up racist sentiment on which the president is hoping to base his reelection.
O`DONNELL: You`ve been watching here in New York since you got in trouble with the Justice Department over racial discrimination in housing practices with his father. There is no surprise to you, I don`t think, in any of this. Does it look to you like this is the campaign, this is the Trump presidential campaign? Try not to -- don`t leave a single racist possible vote behind.
NADLER: It certainly seems that`s a very large part of the Trump campaign. He`s making no attempt to reach out to anybody beyond his so-called base. His base -- he is betraying his base in terms of all the economics. He`s handing -- you know, he`s opposed to minimum wage increases, opposed to any kind of health and safety regulations for the working people. He`s not bringing back manufacturing jobs. He`s doing everything against their interests, but he is appealing to people`s nativism. That`s what this whole immigration thing is about. He`s appealing to people`s nativism and their racial and other prejudices.
O`DONNELL: Now, you`ve said over the weekend, and you`ve said since Friday, that the committee is considering articles of impeachment. Are these the articles that some members have introduced and tried to bring to a vote in the House and have then been referred to your committee?
NADLER: We said this well before Friday, but the press finally picked up on this. We said in notices for hearings we held back on July 12th. Yes, there are articles of impeachment that were referred by various member -- that were introduced by various members of the committee -- I`m sorry -- of the House several months ago that we referred to the committee. And obviously, we are investigating all of the president`s crimes and violations of the Constitution. And we will present them to the American people and we will do what we have to, and we will then consider whether to report those articles of impeachment or some new articles of impeachment which we may draft for ourselves to the floor, to the House.
O`DONNELL: And you said in a shorter version of that, in legal filings seeking the underlying evidentiary material --
NADLER: Seeking grand jury material.
O`DONNELL: Yes, in the Mueller report. So, you`re telling a judge that we are considering the impeachment -- an impeachable procedure against this president, so we need this information.
NADLER: Yes. So, we need this information. Grand jury information you can`t get. The court of appeals in Washington ruled that you don`t have inherent right to grand jury information unless you come within one of the statutory exceptions. One of the statutory exceptions is a judicial proceeding. An impeachment is a judicial or preliminary judicial proceeding, and we`ve told the court that we are investigating possible -- all Article 1 remedies and possible recommendation of impeachment articles to the floor. And on the same basis, we`re going into court this week to enforce our subpoena against former White House counsel McGahn, and we`ll be telling the court that the enforcement of that subpoena is absolutely necessary in our investigation of possible impeachment articles.
O`DONNELL: And when we first discussed this in December, I made the point in basically introducing you that here is the person who is going to have the unique power to initiate impeachment proceedings. And as you`ve pointed out over the weekend, there is more than one way to do this. I think a lot of people have fallen into the belief that the entire House has to pass a resolution asking you to start impeachment, or authorizing you to it. That`s one way. That`s -- a version of that has happened in the past.
NADLER: A version of that --
O`DONNELL: But you can also just start it yourself.
NADLER: Well, there have been -- impeachments have been started in several ways. Even the Nixon impeachment, the House directed the Judiciary Committee to do an impeachment -- to investigate impeachment articles about six months after the committee started doing that.
O`DONNELL: Yes.
NADLER: There have been a number of impeachments where the House never made such a vote. Impeachments of various judges, that went through, where the committee did it on its own initiative. And we certainly have ample power to do that, and we`re doing it.
O`DONNELL: Might that be the way this -- if this moves to formal consideration of articles of impeachment where --
NADLER: We are in --
O`DONNELL: OK, go ahead.
NADLER: -- consideration of articles of impeachment among other remedies. There is nothing called formal consideration. We are considering -- we are investigating the actions of the president. We have impeachment resolutions on file with the committee. We may introduce others. And at the conclusion of our investigations, we will either vote on those impeachment resolutions or we will not. Maybe we`ll vote on essential or something, but that`s all being considered now.
O`DONNELL: So, this -- in other words, this looks a lot -- this could look a lot like the legislative process might, on some sort of criminal justice legislation moving through your committee, which is to say you`re investigating some kind of criminal justice reform, and after having a bunch of informational hearings about it, at a certain point, the chairman just comes out with basically a schedule saying, we`re going to have a vote on these reforms on a given day. So --
NADLER: Essentially right.
O`DONNELL: -- we could at some point down the road have a day where Chairman Nadler announces that he is going to schedule a vote on two, three, four, whatever it is, articles of impeachment on X date at X time, release those articles, and that will be the moment.
NADLER: That`s (ph) -- well, that will be the moment for the vote.
O`DONNELL: Yes, right.
NADLER: But the --
O`DONNELL: But everything leading up to that is what people would think of as an impeachment inquiry.
NADLER: Well, people can think what they want. Everything leading up in that is the process that leads up to possible voting on articles of impeachment. We have to -- you know, we`ve accomplished several things, I think. Number one, last week with the Mueller hearings, despite the press saying, well, you know, he wasn`t the rock star and so forth, that`s not important. What`s important is that we broke the logjam of the lies being told by the attorney general, by the president that the findings where of the Mueller report were no collusion, no obstruction and total exoneration. All three of those are not true. The Mueller report found, after an exhaustive investigation very clearly that the Russians attacked our democracy, that -- in order to help the Trump campaign. That the Trump campaign welcomed that help, worked with the Russians, formed their messaging strategy around anticipated releases of information stolen by the Russians at certain periods of time. That the president lied to investigators and lied to the American people, that he told other people to lie to investigators. All of those are very serious crimes of obstruction of justice. So, you now have the Mueller report, and I think this word will seep out, that they found very serious evidence of very serious crimes by the president when president -- plus they`re working with the Russians to subvert an American election, which is another serious crime. And we have to look into this now. We have to lay out more evidence before the American people. We have to get the witnesses -- the Mueller report is a summary of what other witnesses told them. We have to get the same witnesses -- Don McGahn, Hope Hicks, Cory Lewandowski, other people, to come in and testify. And we are breaking the logjam. This is what our litigation is designed to do, to break the logjam of the administration doing what was unprecedented, denying all congressional subpoenas, denying all information. Nixon did much less than that in terms of opposing subpoenas and that was Article 3 of the impeachment of Nixon. This president said right out front he`s going to deny all subpoenas. But we have to break that logjam, and we are in the strongest position of doing so when we can honestly tell the court we`re doing so for the purpose of considering how to discipline the president, where we need and whether we should vote articles of impeachment.
O`DONNELL: More and more members of the House want to move into a vote on articles of impeachment. We`re now up to 100 -- well over 100, 109, something like that, today. There seems to have been significant movement since the Mueller hearing. What do you -- what is the -- what is the point of this count? Is there a spot we`re going to get to in that number where something changes in the dynamic in the House?
NADLER: Well, I don`t know that the specific number is that important, but obviously the more members of the House say that we should on articles of impeachment or even just have an inquiry, the more -- the easier it is politically to do it. Now, this should not be a political issue, but it is political to some extent because it`s not traditional. But it makes it easier, and it shows the numbers who have seen the serious nature of the allegations and the serious evidence here, and also who have seen back home that people are paying attention and are getting more involved in this. Because ultimately, the American people, if we`re going to vote articles of impeachment, the American people have to be in a position to support that.
O`DONNELL: Nancy Pelosi seems more reluctant to go in this direction than you do. From my observation having worked in the Senate for a committee chairman, it is common for a leader of one of the bodies to be in a slightly different posture on something than a chairman. That happens in multiple directions all the time. Where do you see yourself in terms of --
NADLER: Let me just say --
O`DONNELL: Go ahead.
NADLER: The lawsuit we brought last Friday to get the grand jury material. The lawsuit we`re bringing this week to get McGahn`s testimony. And if we break McGahn, we`ll get everybody else`s testimony because it`s the same legal issue.
O`DONNELL: Uh-huh.
NADLER: They could not have been brought without the strong support of Speaker Pelosi. They`re being brought by the House counsel, which is his office which is controlled by the speaker, not by the chairman of Judiciary Committee. And Speaker Pelosi is just as determined to hold this president accountable as anyone.
O`DONNELL: All right. Let me just go to something before you go, which is the president`s 9/11 lie today. I just to want show this to the audience before we discuss it.
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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers and other first responders. And I was down there also, but I`m not considering myself a first responder, but I was I down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you. Since September 11th, we --
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O`DONNELL: That was an audience that had a lot of people who were down there. None of them clapped for that, indicating that they don`t believe he was down there and some people who were there told "The New York Times" afterwards, no, he was not down there.
NADLER: Well, I was there, not all the time. I never saw him there. I thought what the -- what the federal government did in the aftermath of the 9/11 disaster was shameful. I fault no one for working on the pile without proper respiratory equipment the first three days when he may have been saving people and there might have been people still buried there. But after three days, it was a cleanup, not a rescue operation. And you had the head of the EPA and the mayor of the city of New York, for that matter, is assuring everybody that the air was safe to breathe, and we know perfectly well it was not safe to breathe. I was telling people, don`t send your kids back to school, don`t go to work there, don`t work on the pile because it is not --
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O`DONNELL: What made you think that at that point?
NADLER: Well, because you went down there --
O`DONNELL: You went down there.
NADLER: I was down there.
O`DONNELL: You smelt it.
NADLER: Right, you smelt it, obviously, but you saw the dust over everything. You knew that within that dust, there had to be asbestos, had to be fine bits of concrete. The first two days that they were saying that the air was safe to breathe, we really didn`t have scientific data, we just had suspicions. After that, we knew they were lying. We had the scientific data. We had environmentalist groups telling us. And people were being told, it`s safe to work there. It`s safe to go back to school. It`s safe to work on the pile. It was -- it was -- I get so upset. It was not only unjustified, it was manslaughter. It`s manslaughter on the part of the federal government and the mayor of the city at that point to allow people -- or to tell people it was safe when we knew it wasn`t safe. And people are dying and will continue to die because of that today.
O`DONNELL: Chairman Jerry Nadler, thank you very much for joining us tonight. I really appreciate it.
NADLER: Thank you.
O`DONNELL: Thank you.
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