MSNBC "All In with Chris Hayes" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse

Interview

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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is a Democrat from Rhode Island who serves in the Senate Judiciary Committee. He just wrote this opinion piece from the Boston Globe about the upcoming first-ever summit for democracy. The State Department will convene to help fortify democracies and fight against things like corruption and authoritarianism.

Senator, you are obviously a colleague of David Perdue before he lost that election in a free and fair election in which the people chose to kick him out of his office. It just strikes me as like, craven, shabby, and odious to sign up for a primary challenge under these conditions. But I wonder what you think of someone who knows the man.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D-RI): I`m a little surprised myself. I did not see him as somebody who was going to be this allied with Trump for this particular reason.

HAYES: There`s no other real way to interpret it, right? I mean, this is what it`s about, right?

WHITEHOUSE: I can see it.

HAYES: You can`t -- you can`t say there`s some other agenda here.

WHITEHOUSE: No. And well, if you look at Georgia, you know, you see that Trump has got these candidates in his Trump slate that he`s trying to move into Georgia, and that`s one issue. You played the tape of his call to Secretary State Raffensperger. And that`s part of a scheme to try to influence the election, and in fact, to try to cheat in that election. That goes straight into Georgia, as well as David Perdue.

And then you got a third thread, which I`ll bring in, if you don`t mind, which is Jeffrey Clark, the guy we`re looking at in the Senate Judiciary Committee who was in the U.S. Department of Justice, nominally in charge of the environment division, which under Trump, you know, he wasn`t supposed to do anything in and he got himself all cooked up with a scheme to undo the election. Where? In Georgia.

HAYES: Yes.

WHITEHOUSE: He`s now pled the fifth. He`s not exactly a principal figure. He`s kind of dweeby. So, the likelihood that there were people behind him steering that letter at Georgia as part of that scheme operating within the Department of Justice and through the Department of Justice, is a pretty strong probability right now.

So, you know, Georgia could be the place Trump goes for redemption but Georgia could also be the place where justice comes for Trump.

HAYES: You mentioned Jeffrey Clark and he`s sort of evolved in the Department of Justice. He apparently has played the fifth now in terms of the subpoena from the committee. There are other layers here as well. I mean, what we`re seeing happen in real-time is the assembling of people that will be willing to do what Raffensperger was -- didn`t, right?

BUT even before we get to that, we have state governments that are controlled by Republican state legislators and governors, like in Texas, gerrymandering their maps at the state rep level. And at the congressional level today, an announcement from the Department of Justice, they will be suing Texas over its new map.

Of course, they couldn`t block it ahead of time, thanks to the Roberts Court, which has gutted the Voting Rights Act, and has given essentially carp launch in a later case to essentially pursue this kind of extreme gerrymandering, which sort of manages to rig the game before anyone has to count any votes or before you have to do any post-election jockeying of the Secretary of State.

WHITEHOUSE: Yes. Now, your end of the whole other question of how dark money packed the Supreme Court and captured it the way industries are accustomed to capturing regulatory agencies to do its bidding, and how extremely obediently the Roberts Court signaled by a whole armada of dark money funded Amicus groups from the right wing have done exactly that.

And again, it all aligns towards reduced democracy and more power for special interests, particularly for very rich special interests who could hide behind the anonymity that the court has provided them.

HAYES: There`s a growing sense -- I mean, I feel very pitch sense about the health of American democracy. I think sometimes there`s a frustration. There`s insufficient appreciation in your chamber of what the stakes are. There`s a filibuster that stands in the way of the Democratic majority passing structural democratic reform that might be able to sort of forestall some of the worst-case scenario, strengthen democracy. Do you agree with the critics who look at what the Senate is doing and say, you`re not doing enough?

WHITEHOUSE: We are totally not doing enough. On the other hand, you`ve got, you know, a local DA in Fulton County, Georgia who`s doing her job of doing a proper investigation. You`ve got this litigation by the Department of Justice which if they energetic and aggressive, particularly in the discovery phase, they could find out quite a lot. We`ve got our investigations going in the Judiciary Committee in the Senate.

So, there`s more to be done on the investigative side and more to be discovered, I think, through courts and through investigators. So, while we are kind of blocked up with trying to find a way procedurally forward around Republican obstruction and filibuster of these democracy reforms, there still are good proceedings that could yield very valuable information that could help turn this thing.

[20:15:39]

HAYES: Yes, I mean, the court -- the courts` role in this in this sort of like, back and forth between the courts jurisprudence on these sort of key democratic structural reforms, them sort of giving the green light to state legislators to sort of barricade themselves into power. You know, it has a kind of flywheel effect I think that we`re all watching, right?

I mean, this is the fear that you attenuate the ability to call people to account, that you attenuate the basic mechanisms of democratic accountability before you even get to this aversion question. How important do you think this summit is this week? Is it a real thing or is it -- is it show?

WHITEHOUSE: No, I think the summit is real. I think that there are two separate dark money, dark economy problems that America is facing. One is the dark money control that is packed to Supreme Court that has done climate denial, that is behind voter suppression, and that runs so much of Republican politics.

The other is on the international side kleptocrats and criminals are able to hide enormous amounts of stolen money, and they hide it in rule of law countries behind the secrecy that is used by the domestic schemers. So, the to relate in that sense and the shared solution for both is a lot more transparency to give to American citizens, voters. What James Madison called for which is knowledge because knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And you can`t allow the American people to be ignorant of what`s going on around them by letting politics be secret.

HAYES: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, thank you so much for making time tonight.

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