CNN Newsroom: Interview with Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA)

Interview

"Well, it will be a -- if he wants to make a show out of it, he probably will. It will be very interesting when that show takes him into the courtroom and he is sitting there with the jury off to his side.

We expected this, those of us that have followed the January 6th hearings we've expected that Trump would be indicted in multiple ways. We also knew that this case in Georgia was likely to be a very strong case, had no idea it would involve so many people.

But this is going to come to a head very, very quickly. Two of the defendants now want to have a trial within the next two months.

And next week, actually I think it's Monday, we will have a situation in which meadows will be in court, and a lot of the information about what the prosecutors have available to them will become public at that time.

So this is going to unfold very, very quickly. And yes, the mug shot is out there. I looked at it, I'm going, "Oh, boy, I don't want to get near this guy. That's one mean-looking guy."

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He's pretty much proved that over the last five years.

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No. He should not. He should stay out of this, and he shouldn't be commenting at all. The mug shot comment was probably as far as he should go. He should not have his fingers, his hands, or his words anywhere near this.

Let the criminal justice system play out. Both at the federal level, the state level, and even in the civil courts.

Let that process proceed unimpeded in any way by the White House or any politicians.

Unfortunately, that is not the case in the U.S. Congress. We are seeing in the U.S. Congress Jim Jordan, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and chairman of the Weaponization of Government Subcommittee using his power as a weapon to stop these investigations, to delay them or to derail them. And that is wrong.

And so no, the President should --

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-- out of it. Let it play out. Pardon?

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Well, I am a member of the Weaponization Committee, and our ranking member, Tracy, is absolutely spectacular in holding Jordan to account. And I'll do my piece of it also.

The bottom line of this is Jim Jordan is using his position as chairman of an extraordinary powerful committee, two of them actually, to stop a legitimate law enforcement effort not only in Georgia but also in New York.

That is wrong. And it may, depending on how far he goes and how threatening he may be in his actions and in his demands for documents and subpoenas, he may very well wind up breaking a local law of intimidating a district attorney or the district attorney's staff.

So we're going to make -- we will defend the appropriate judicial process that is now under way. We'll defend it in hearings if that's where Jordan wants to go, and we will defend it publicly as I am right now.

The process of the three branches of government sharing power, holding each branch to account, is an extraordinary experiment that's worked over two centuries for the United States. And we should not allow that to be lost in any way.

One of the things that clearly was at risk in January 6th was our democracy. Now we're seeing that balance of power playing out.

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Well, what would you expect? If you're going to shoot the king you damn well better not miss. And here we have an example of that. Putin has said publicly that revenge is sweetest when it's cold.

Two months after Wagner's -- Prigozhin's uprising, gee whiz, a plane blows up outside of Moscow. That's no surprise. I guess the surprise is how it -- was it a plane that came out of -- flew -- exploded in the air, or was it a gunshot or a traffic accident, something was going to happen to Prigozhin.

Just like has happened to other people that have challenged in one way or another Putin. Those people that challenge Putin wind up dead. And here we have one more example of that. Of course the Kremlin is going to deny involvement. What a surprise.

This plane didn't fall out of the sky by itself. It fell out of the sky because it was damaged in some way. Some of the talk is there was an explosive on board.

We're going to find out as best we can. The intelligence agencies are combing over it. And I'm quite certain that Wagner's -- Prigozhin's Wagner troops and loyalists are similarly searching for the answers.

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Thank you, Jim.

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