Transcription
and ongoing effort to whitewash his own story and our country's history, burnished his very tarnished image. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump and his allies have discussed pushing lawmakers to pass a resolution aimed at voiding his first term impeachment. That's according to people familiar with the matter.
While pretending to undo Trump's record as the only American president to be impeached twice by bipartisan groups of members might serve Trump's ego by way of abusing the federal government, it would carry no legal significance. There's zero precedent or procedure in the Constitution for undoing a past impeachment. But as the Wall Street Journal reports, quote, any move to attempt to erase the two impeachments in 2019 and 2021 would open up a debate about Trump's past behavior in office, forcing Republican lawmakers to re-litigate charges of abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, and inciting an insurrection.
While overnight, Trump called for the expulsion of Congressman and Jamie Raskin lashing out at one of his biggest perceived political enemies and thorns in his side over what will almost certainly be Trump's third impeachment next year should Democrats take control of the House. I want to bring in that thorn, Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskett of Maryland, he's a ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. I wonder what you make of Trump's obsession with the two he is certainly having some he is certainly having some nightmare flashbacks this week to it. Of course, the easy way to avoid impeachment is to stop engaging in impeachable offenses, stop committing high crimes and misdemeanors, then you've got nothing to worry about.
Look, that has been he wants to somehow insinuate into the national consciousness that he won the presidential election which he lost by more than 7 million votes to Joe Biden on a vote of 306 to 232. And then therefore that somehow justified a mass mob we have a police officers on the Capitol, storming of the Capitol, chanting Hang Mike Pence, driving us out of the proceeding to constitute he is obsessed with it because he knows he's wrong. I mean, there's some deformed core of a conscience in there that makes him return to the scene of the crime the way that the criminals always so there are of course, as you say, Nicole, no provision in the Constitution for expunging an impeachment. But if they want to have a resolution saying they disagree with that vote the Democrats, they should go ahead and have a resolution and say they think Donald Trump won the election. They think that that violent insurrection they wanted the inside political coup to transpire. They wanted the inside political coup to transpire and let's get them all on record and enough is enough but remember, Donald Trump, uniformly, that there was no electoral fraud and there was no electoral corruption. So all of this is a fantasy on his part, and the question is how deeply this rot has sunk into the consciousness of his MAGA-cult members that they're actually willing to follow him off of the ledge like that.
Do you think it speaks to any premeditation of what he plans to do in November? Well, you know, we have to he continues to be on our guard. He continues to try to attack voting rights, attack voting rights organizations like the pro-democracy organization there is an opposition in Ohio whose office just got railed. They continue to pass different disenfranchisement and voter suppression laws all over he tried to steal the election with things that the January 6th select committee found, like for example, him calling up the Secretary of State of Georgia, Mr. Raffensperger, and saying, just find me 11,780 votes, that's all I want. Instead, people are thinking somehow he was cheated out of he has a fantastical majority in his head. But look, they have not laid a finger on a single finding of the January 6th select committee and there is not was not one iota of evidence that Donald Trump won that election. He lost that election soundly to Joe Biden and that was an insurrection, which is why, you know, his desired attorney general is out there trying to withdraw and vacate the charges against Proud Boys and Oath in the United States, it was sentenced to jail for decades for engaging in seditious conspiracy which means a conspiracy to overthrow and put down the government of the United They want to make each one of them into a mega-millionaire. They want to make each one of them into a mega-millionaire. We've heard from Enrique Tario, he head of the Proud Boys, well, he doesn't need the anti-weaponization fund, which has now been blocked by two different federal judges in which the whole country is denouncing. He said he doesn't need that because he'll get millions of dollars directly from the judgment fund, which was set up long ago, decades ago by Congress to pay for verdicts against the United States. Not a single one of these insurrectionists has won any litigation against the government for false or malicious prosecution. It's themselves and Trump's inner circle. And when you talk about what Enrique Tarrio has said publicly about knowing the money will come to him one way or another, what Donald Trump has said about the fund being, quote, beautiful, and what the convicted child molester that NPR reported on, telling his child sexual molestation victim to be quiet when I get my money from the compensation fund. I'll give you some of it if you keep quiet about my crimes, I mean, what if Democrats regain control, what part of the money would you want to investigate and how would you do that?
Well, let's start with that point you just there are 97 pardoned violent and other criminals who were convicted of crimes on January 6th, who have gone on they want to re-offend ever since Donald Trump granted them their commutation and pardon. One of them, Andrew Paul Johnson sexually assaulted a 12-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl. As you say, months before the public knew anything formal about this, was saying we all are going to get paid off and I'll share my money with you if you don't turn me into the police. That guy is now doing a life sentence for the crimes he committed against those kids whose lives have now they have now been irrevocably altered by virtue of Donald Trump's decision to pardon them and commute their sentence and sentences. We would like to look at what the effect of that mass I think that's what this pardon was. Remember, up until Donald Trump, all the other presidents had looked at them case by case whether somebody had actually expressed remorse and contrition, whether they constituted a safety risk to the public and letting them out, whether they paid back their fines and whether they paid back the money owed to their victims. Donald Trump just wiped this slate he has wiped the slate clean for more than a billion dollars of restitution and fines that were owed through all of the pardons he's offered because a lot of them are also to white-collar criminals, convicted fraudsters like himself who still owed lots of money to their victims. We're going to get into all of that. People need to see what the corruption has been and then what we can do to try to turn the president has done nothing to get healthcare to the people, but rather throw millions of people off of their healthcare. We have done nothing to bring down inflation but rather driven up the price of gasoline to $4 you so much for $4.50 a gallon in a lot of places. So we need that forward policy agenda at the same time we need to expose all of the the corruption that has been crippling our economy. Congressman Jamie Raskin, thank you so much for your time today. So much work ahead. We appreciate I don't want to take a narrow slice of the bad behavior and a single pool of the bad guys Trump associated with.
You could you could do what the congressman just said. You could take all the pardoned insurrectionists and really shine a light on the recidivism, the depravity of their crimes. I mean, they talked about one of the Trump insurrectionists went on to the money, how did they know before Todd Blanch did that they were going to get paid for their crimes? I think one of the things, this is always a challenge for, think about this in the political context, shining a light from the, in terms of like doing ads or whatever. I think that for a lot of Democrats, the sins that Donald Trump is you have Donald Trump who promised throughout an entire campaign that he was going to lower prices for people and care about the economy and now you have him on tape saying I don't think about people's financial well-being. And I love the inflation, right? That's an ad that I think will test quite strongly when it gets put together. The ad that focus that shines a light on some of these insurrectionists, it's not that you and I can't make the case for why that reflects badly on Donald Trump. You can. But it's not as direct, right? It's these are bad guys. People don't approve of the insurrectionists, it's a two-part argument. Well, here are these people. We're shining a light on these people and also Donald Trump who is probably not in photographs with any of them, who is not praised specifically. It's just a little bit more of a reach when you have you have so much devastating damaging data and video, I think a lot of people are going to choose to go with that first with the economic argument rather than this other argument, although I think obviously this argument on the merits, the argument about the insurrectionists is incredibly powerful and damning.
It's insane. And damning, but maybe not quite as ad-friendly as some of the others that we've heard. It's just when you think about how far from anything politically normal we are. Trump pardoned someone who went on to molest two children. I mean... It would stop the country in its tracks if it were anyone else. Trump pardoned people who beat police officers with flagpoles. I mean, the recidivism makes it all the more outrageous, galling, morally indefensible. But the initial pardon was indefensible. And you think about what someone so what the worst, if you you shone a light on the worst behavior of the insurrectionists on that day. You don't need to get, the recidivism makes it, you know, compounds the problem, but the initial crime of the pardon, which is to say, moral crime of it. It's one of the, it continues to this day to be of the things in Trump 2.0 from the moment it happened until today that I find most outrageous and morally disturbing, galling, the thing that makes me angriest is thinking about those pardons. And it was like that when he first issued them and it still is today. Yeah. in one more break.