MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse

Interview

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Joining us now is Rhode Island senator, member of the Judiciary Committee, Sheldon Whitehouse. He sat it in some of the testimony that`s built -- used to build this report. I should tell you that Senator Whitehouse is also a former prosecutor. He served as U.S. attorney in Rhode Island. He was also the state`s attorney general, uniquely qualified to comment on this matter.

Senator, it`s a pleasure to see you tonight. Thanks for being here.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D-RI): Thanks for having me on.

MADDOW: So this is a lot of material. It`s about a 50-page staff report. It`s several hundred pages worth of transcripts. It`s several hundred pages worth of exhibits. What do you think the public should understand is the most important thing that you and your colleagues have found this far?

WHITEHOUSE: I think there`s three really key takeaways from. This first it`s a very simple one, and that`s how deeply, personally involved, President Trump, was in all of this -- meetings, in phone calls, and contacts, Oval Office, he was neck deep in this personally. So that would be point one.

Point two would be how much of this scheme focused on Georgia. The letter was about Georgia. The schemes to maneuver U.S. attorney Pak out of Georgia were obviously about Georgia. And it supplements whatever investigative materials the Fulton County D.A., D.A. Willis, is pulling together to look at Trump`s efforts to subvert the election in Georgia. So it ties together into what could be a very interesting case in the Fulton County D.A`s office.

And the last is. It`s appeared in the transcript and in the statements, that it was even more important if you are in the room, more evident if you are in the room, with district attorney general -- Acting Attorney General Rosen. These guys did not have much respect for Jeffrey Clark. This guy was kind of a nobody. He`d been put into run the environment division for Trump, which obviously meant he was supposed to do nothing.

Because of vacancies at the end of the term, he was only acting civil division chief, and, it`s a little hard to imagine, that he took this up on his own, or that he would tangle with Rosen and Donoghue like this on his own. And he landed mighty quickly at the dark money shop called the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

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And I don`t know who`s paying him to be there. But I think there`s a bigger story, about what`s behind this scheme. One school of thought is this is an ambitious, nobody saw this moment, took a shot at it, and got shot down by his peers. But equally plausible scenario, is that this guy was put up to it, that someone drafted that complex letter involving areas of line which he had no expertise, for him to produce to Rosen and Donoghue, and looking behind what`s took place the Department of Justice, I think this is why this is only an interim report. We need to keep looking at those other elements.

MADDOW: Am I right, Senator, that Mr. Clark has refused requests to be interviewed thus far? He, obviously, there`s no transcript of an interview has been released with him today. The committee is still presumably seeking his cooperation, his testimony. As well as all the White House documents you`re not able to get thus far from the national archive.

WHITEHOUSE: I don`t -- I don`t -- I don`t know what I`m allowed to say about that, under the committee rules right now. So I should probably just pass on that question. Sorry.

MADDOW: OK. If that`s all right --

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WHITEHOUSE: He`s an essential person in this saga and at some point, in the committee, before a grand jury, someplace, his testimony is going to be obtained.

MADDOW: Let me just ask you, Senator, there`s a lot of focus on Mr. Clark and what he did. And it was kind of a shocking revelation today in the materials came out that there has been a referral by the committee to the D.C. bar, to look into Mr. Clark. And whether he should potentially be disciplined as a lawyer for what he did here.

I, though, as explained in the intro, am struck by the fact that there are other senior Justice Department officials, who are very willing to use the resources of the department, to jump down these rabbit holes on Trump`s behalf, up to and including the deputy attorney general, Mr. Donoghue, and the attorney general, Mr. Barr, all of whom told U.S. attorneys to chase this stuff down.

Is that a problem for the Justice Department, in an ongoing way? Is that a prime matter for the inspector general? Is that a matter for referral the bar associations?

WHITEHOUSE: Possibly. It`s not all that clear. To the extent that what they were doing was running down allegations of violations to federal law, then that`s with the Department of Justice is there for.

To the extent that it would be obvious to any sentient person that these were cockamamie allegations, to pursue them beyond the point that they were credible, begins to take you outside of the scope of the protection of doing legitimate law enforcing investigations.

In any event, there`s a lot of Department of Justice policies about what you do when, when you are closing in on an investigation, when you`re in that sensitive period, around the elections, around the count. And I suspect they were pretty sloppy about all of this.

And, of course, last of all, there`s the long-standing rules we`ve talked about before about contacts between the Department of Justice and the White House. And it appears a lot of this mischief might well have been done outside of the rules, that allow contacts between the White House and the Department of Justice.

So, there`s plenty of fodder for the IG and Office of Professional Responsibility to look at. And even if the people have moved on, they can still make a report to see what preventative measures should be put into the departments so this kind of stuff can`t happen again.

MADDOW: Yeah, that`s exactly right. The U.S. Justice Department, can never be used in this way again, the question is how we insure accountability now, and clarity now about what happened, to make sure it doesn`t happen.

WHITEHOUSE: This is an attempted coup d`etat within the Department of Justice against the attorney general. And it seems unlikely that this character Jeffrey Clark came up with this on his own.

MADDOW: Fascinating.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, member of the Judiciary Committee, former U.S. attorney, former state attorney general - sir, thanks for being with us tonight. Much appreciated.

WHITEHOUSE: My pleasure.

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