The Lead with Jake Tapper: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Is Interviewed About Trump's Hearing

Interview

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Well, it feels like a great vindication of the rule of law in American democracy for me. You know, for more than two years, people have been asking me, wherever I go, will there really be legal consequences? Is he going to be able to escape this like everything else?

And it's good to know that, you know, the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they turn. And the Department of Justice, with the grand jury rendered an indictment. And, of course, Donald Trump is entitled to every presumption of innocence and all the due process of law that he has wanted to deny to other people who he considers his adversaries.

But the beauty of our system of justice is that everybody's entitled to that. And he's got a judge who's a former public defender, a former criminal defense lawyer, who's extremely attuned to the rights of defendants.

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Well, I think the fact that Donald Trump's conspirators are unindicted at this point make it far more likely that the trial will move quickly and that the, you know, constitutional guarantee of a speedy trial with due process will be observed. So I think we've got a good chance of seeing that. I think the facts are known. And, you know, I don't know exactly what Donald Trump's defense would be, whether it's an alibi defense that he really wasn't there, or that he was misunderstood in the things that he was doing and the things he was saying or whether, you know, he is going to maintain the pretense and fiction which he was perfectly well aware of, that he had actually won the election.

We'll see if he goes that route or if he, you know, tries to deal with this as a constitutional matter and claim that all he was doing was engaging in free speech, which, of course, is phony. The First Amendment does not give you the right to try to overthrow the government, to engage in an insurrection, to obstruct a federal proceeding, or to defraud the American people out of an election.

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Well, if it's political, it's coming from Republicans, because the overwhelming number of witnesses that we heard from on the January 6th Select Committee were Republican in the Trump administration, were in the Trump family. Those were the people who were closest to the criminal events that took place, and they saw exactly what Donald Trump was doing and the activities that he was engaged in.

But in any event, that's a transparent attempt by the former president to denigrate and to run into the ground the American system of justice. I mean, the reason that we have faith in it is precisely because we don't believe in just Trump judges or Republican judges or Democrat judges the kinds of things that Donald Trump talks about. It really comes down to him, in his case, to people who will do his will no matter what, and then people who actually stand up for the rule of law and for our system of justice in our Constitution.

He obviously has an autocratic, dictatorial frame of mind, which is totally opposed to legalism in the American system of justice.

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You bet.

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