Fox News "The Ingraham Angle" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Lee Zeldin

Interview

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Laura Ingraham:
Congressman Zeldin, Adam Schiff is still trying to give it the old college try. I want your reaction to something he said over the weekend. Watch.

Adam Schiff:
The public support for impeachment has grown fairly dramatically in the last two months. So, whether it is now essentially at a plateau or whether it will continue to grow or shrink, I don't think is really the question we should be asking.
 
Laura Ingraham:
Congressman Zeldin, we've seen the exact opposite trend over the past three and a half weeks. Even among Democrats, losing interest at the very least.

Lee Zeldin:
Yeah. His imagination has grown. He certainly wants to be able to sell this fairytale that he's writing. He wanted to be a screenwriter. And essentially, he's trying to connect dots that aren't connected. He's relying on second-, third-, fourth-hand hearsay. You've been covering this a lot over the course of the last couple of months. The facts aren't on his side, but he's desperate to sell this, and when he said on the Sunday morning news shows that he has to go back and talk to his constituents as if his mind wasn't made up, give me a break. I think that he really wants to go forward with impeachment.

What's interesting going forward, if precedent means anything, Ken Starr, as the independent counsel during the Clinton impeachment, presented his report in person under oath. That's how much he believed in it. Let's see how much Adam Schiff believes in the report that he's about to turn in about a week from now. Will he be willing to show up at the House Judiciary Committee, for example, under oath and answer questions? Will he face cross-examination not just from Republicans, but also from the president's counsel? Let see if the prosecutor, the judge, the jury Adam Schiff will take his report from his kangaroo court to the American people and answer those tough questions. He's way ahead of his skis here, and I think he's going to pay a huge price. But I don't know if the Democrats really, at this point, can roll back from impeachment --

Laura Ingraham:
Yeah, the Squad is going to go --

Lee Zeldin:
-- because they've really gone all in.

Laura Ingraham:
Let me just say this. The Squad is going to go totally nuts on this one. I mean, they're not going to be satisfied with a censure, I can't imagine, but, look, they could say, you know, "We appreciate you all, but we've got to do this for the good of the party and the country." But I don't think --

Lee Zeldin:
The question is --

Laura Ingraham:
Hold on, hold on. I've got to get to some breaking news, guys. This is very important. Earlier tonight, Obama-appointed federal judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has ruled that former White House counsel Don McGahn must comply with the House impeachment subpoena. The DOJ has already said it's going to appeal. It should also be noted that our competitors were loath to admit tonight that if upheld at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, McGahn could just show up to Congress and assert privilege on as many questions as he wanted. Alan, your response to the hyperbolic reaction to this. One federal district court judge in D.C. on this question of McGahn.

Alan Dershowitz:
Well, the big winner is Uber, because McGahn is going to have to get into his car, he's going to have to go over to the Capitol, raise his hand, take an oath, and then he can invoke privilege. So, this has no substantive impact. The judge went out of her way to say, "I am not ruling on the issues of privilege. All I'm saying is he has to show up." She used that word, and then she went nuts talking about how the president is not the king. Of course, the president is not the king. The president is far more powerful than the king. The president has the power that kings have never had. He's a very, very powerful office, and the Framers wanted it that way. That's why they required for impeachment very strict criteria to be met. And we don't live in a parliamentary democracy where parliament can just vote to remove a leader, a prime minister. So, this decision itself has no big impact. All it means is people have to show up, and then they can invoke the privilege.

Laura Ingraham:
Well, just to your point, Alan, just a line from the opinion. And the king -- the reference to the king was kind of a giveaway on this judge if you ask me. But the court distinguishes this issue from the very different question of whether the specific information that high-level presidential aides may be asked to provide in the context of such questioning can be withheld from the committee on the basis of [unintelligible] privilege. So, that's Alan's point. So, it only goes to the specific question of whether he must physically present himself. And Congressman Zeldin, contrary to what the kind of the measured analysis of Dershowitz just there, this is what Neal Katyal said on MSNBC, who was Solicitor General for a short period of time for President Obama. Watch.

Neal Katyal:
These arguments are so silly that I just don't think the Supreme Court is likely to take them in the end. What Barr has said is something that no responsible constitutional scholar in our history has ever adopted. It's King George III-plus, is basically what Barr is advocating for. These kinds of views are really written in crayon. They're not written in any sort of analytically sophisticated or even accurate way.

Laura Ingraham:
Congressman, Barr versus Katyal. Who might be having the better argument here? They were relying on precedent as far I can tell. DOJ was relying on the Janet Reno precedent on this.

Lee Zeldin:
Right, and as I'm listening to that, I -- there's only one Alan Dershowitz, and I wish that there was more Alan Dershowitz, you know, being able to weigh in on this issue. It's obviously going to be appealed at ruling. It was an expected ruling. Before the ruling had even come out, you could guess that this is the way it was going to go. And to executive privilege, I'll tell you, during the closed-door depositions that took place, this was one of the problems with not allowing the White House counsel present in the room. If someone was to ask a question of one of these witnesses being deposed about a conversation with the president of the United States, there was no one in the room to exert executive privilege.

Laura Ingraham:
Oh, that's --

Lee Zeldin:
It was up to the witness, and if that witness --

Laura Ingraham:
That's an interesting point, Congressman Zeldin. Alan, is that a -- is that something that struck you as well? Why didn't the White House counsel get to go to those closed-door sessions?

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