'This Week' Transcript 8-6-23: John Lauro, Rep. Pete Aguilar and Gov. Doug Burgum
Interview
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That's just not true. I'm confident that the government will prove that. Jack Smith, in his indictment, said that the former president deliberately disregarded the truth. That was his quote. And our January 6th Committee report showed time and time again that President Trump was told he lost the election by his campaign lawyers, by his advisers. And some of those political advisers told him from even before the election that they weren't going to accept the results of a free and fair election. That's just the truth and those are the facts that we laid out in our report.
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Well, I -- I hope that the president's lawyers then stop putting up hurdles and indicate that they want a speedy trial. That's, I think, where we can get to the -- to the root of this. If they want to have their day in court, they should remove any hurdles and they should seek the truth and seek their day in court. I think the former president's afraid of that. And I think the American public can see right through that and -- and knows.
But, look, this is something that we want to be adjudicated in the courts. If -- we'll let them hash out what that looks like under cross-examination. I played a royal in the Pence hearing and I can tell you I wish that he would have shared some of those notes and some of that information with the January 6th Committee. But it's clear that Vice President Pence took notes and has a pretty good memory of what the president told him and the pressure that he was under from January -- from a Christmas Day phone calls to January 1st, New Year's Day, to the Oval Office meeting on the 3rd and the pressure campaign on the 4th and 5th. And then when the former president still didn't get his way, he tweeted out that Mike Pence has the ability to change this. And -- and that's just unfortunate.
But the bottom line, George, is, everybody saw this. Everybody saw exactly what the former president was doing. We saw the attack on the Capitol, the attack on the police officers and the insurrection. And so for his lawyers or for him to somehow say that this was just a mistake and bad legal advice is pretty sad at this point.
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Yes, he lost 61 times in court when they were challenging the election results. Sixty-one times. And so I think it's just, you know, the height of hypocrisy for them to, you know, bring those arguments out now.
I think it's pretty clear -- I'm not a lawyer, George, but it seems pretty clear to the American public that they are throwing everything they can at the wall and they are trying to see what sticks. The bottom line is, for us to have accountability, we need to ensure that there aren't two sets of legal systems, one for the rich and powerful and one for everyone else. And the former president is allowed his presumption of innocence and his day in court. And I hope that he pushes forward with that and so we can hear these charges even further and we can get to this evidence. That's where we will have, you know, true accountability, and that's what we want.
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Look, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore didn't encourage their supporters to charge the Capitol and overturn a free and fair election. I think it's pretty clear that the -- that the current speaker is -- is pretty frustrated by this. But, you know, this is a guy who stood in the -- in the well of the Capitol building and said that Donald Trump bears responsibility.
The only thing that changed is that he needed to count votes to secure the speaker's gavel. That's the only thing that changed. And so now he has to be, just like many others, a key supporter of the former president, just to hold his caucus together. They have to continue to espouse these extreme, you know, theories and beliefs. And by the way, this is also someone who said years ago that he created the Benghazi subcommittee to attack Hillary Clinton's poll ratings when she got high in the polls, so not exactly a lot of credibility when it comes to this.
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Thank you.
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