CNN "The Situation Room" - Transcript: Interview with Jamie Raskin

Interview

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Joining us to discuss this and more, Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland. He's a key member of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Capitol insurrection.

Congressman, thanks very much for joining us.

Does your committee, we're talking about the select committee, also want to pursue testimony from former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): Well, we want to get testimony from every material witness. There was clearly a campaign originating with Donald Trump but sweeping within it the whole executive branch to try to convert the Department of Justice into an instrument of the president's political will. And that's extraordinary thing that not only over rides the traditional boundary between what's political in the White House and what is law enforcement in DOJ, but it really threatens the Hatch Act.

I mean, they really were attempting to get the Department of Justice to become essentially campaign actors for Donald Trump and we know that that was part of an on going odyssey by the president, the then- president, to overturn the 2020 election and it ended, of course, in the attempted coup and the insurrection.

But in the early days, they were trying to get the DOJ to set the whole thing up by declaring the election corrupt and then as Trump put it, just leave the rest to me and my friends in Congress.

BLITZER: So, when you say violation of the Hatch Act, are you talking about possible criminal behavior?

RASKIN: Well, of course, that's not for Congress to determine but that was the first thing that left out at me. You know, the White House trying to convert the Department of Justice into a bunch of campaign henchmen in order to overthrow popular election results in Georgia and other states.

But they were really trying a number of different methods there. I mean, some cases, as we know, from Trump's call to Secretary of State Raffensperger, they were trying to get election officials simply to concoct votes. That was an attempted conspiracy to election fraud. You know, Trump was trying to get election fraud going in Georgia.

And then at other points, they were approaching Republican led legislatures to get them simply to oust the popular election result, call it fraud or corruption, for whatever reason, call it contaminated and then install Trump electors and when that didn't work, that was when they began to, you know, organize their campaign and orchestrate all the moves against Mike Pence to try to get him to pronounce magical new powers to reject electors coming in from Georgia, from Arizona, from Pennsylvania, and that is what led to the nightmare of January the 6th.

BLITZER: The former vice president stood firmly against all of that.

The Senate Judiciary Committee as you know, Congressman, has documents showing Meadows sent emails to Justice Department, to the Justice Department pushing various election fraud claims. How far along is your committee going in issuing subpoenas that for documents and for testimony? Have many subpoenas actually gone out yet?

RASKIN: Well, we're still in the preparatory phase of these steps towards subpoenas and other investigatory routes that we're on. So, we're in the process of doing that in the month of August and I know that Chairman Thompson wants to move from all deliberate speed.

What I've read about Mark Meadows is overtures to the Department of Justice is that they were floating even some of the most fantastical and absurd election fraud conspiracies about, you know, people in Italy orchestrating campaign results and fraud against Donald Trump through, I don't know, spacecraft or computers or whatever.

You know, they were just taking up the most random conspiracy theories online and then seeing if they could get the United States Department of Justice to embrace them and simply state well, these election results are contaminated in particular states so that Trump and Meadows could put pressure on Republican legislatures there just to appoint Trump electors.

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BLITZER: Yeah.

RASKIN: So these people have identified every vulnerability and booby- trap in the Electoral College to try to politicize the entire institution away from popular election results, and that's a very dangerous thing that we're going to have to look at as not just a committee but a country. What are we going to do about this problem of the ultra-politicization and corruption of the Electoral College system?

BLITZER: You're going to have a lot of work to do.

Congressman Jamie Raskin, thanks so much for joining us.

RASKIN: Thank you for having me, Wolf.

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