Meet the Press - August 6, 2023
Interview
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Thanks for having me.
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Well, first of all, a technical violation of the Constitution is a violation of the Constitution. The Constitution, in six different places, opposes insurrection and makes that a grievous constitutional offense. Um so our Constitution is designed to stop people from trying to overthrow elections and trying to overthrow the government. But in any event, there's a whole apparatus of criminal law which is in place to enforce this constitutional principle. That's what Donald Trump is charged with violating. He conspired to defraud the American people out of our right to an honest election by substituting the real, legal process we have under federal and state law with counterfeit electors. I mean, there are people who are in jail for several years for counterfeiting one vote, if they try to vote illegally once. He tried to steal the entire election. And his lawyer's up there saying, "Oh, that's just a matter of him expressing his First Amendment rights." That's deranged. That is a deranged argument.
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Well, first of all, he's charged as part of a conspiracy. So, there were lots of people who were involved in doing it. But in any event, uh the law that applies to the rest of us also applies to the president of the United States, a principle they understood very well during the impeachment when they were saying, "Well, let's not do it during the impeachment because he's already left office. Deal with this as a matter of criminal law." That's what Senator McConnell said. That's what a bunch of the Republicans said. Now it's like a three-card monte. You can't get him for impeachment because he's already left office, but you can't get him for criminal law, because he once was president. I mean, America can see what's going on here. This is a guy who wants to appoint himself completely immune from the rule of law that applies to the rest of us.
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Well, there's a criminal statute: aiding and abetting, or giving aid and comfort to insurrectionists. Which to the mind of the January 6th committee Donald Trump definitely did. I mean, he's calling them "great patriots." He's saying, "Never forget this day." He continues to laud them to this very day in saying that, when he gets back in, he's gonna pardon all of those people. I mean, they're convicted of assaulting our police officers, and he's talking about pardoning them. A lot of them have pled guilty to seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to overthrow the government. So, um yeah. But he's being charged with conspiracy to obstruct a federal proceeding, the joint session of Congress, and conspiring to defraud us all out of our voting rights. He tried to steal the election away from us.
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No, I think that-- I understand there were prudential and tactical reasons for doing what he did. And I think it's excellent because the basic point is the deprivation of our civil rights. Abraham Lincoln said it best. He said, "An insurrection, an attempt to topple an election, is an attack on the first principle of government which is the right of the people to choose their own leaders."
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Well, I think it should have made a difference psychologically for the senators, like McConnell, who voted no. But, you know, in a juridical sense, what they were saying was that the Senate did not have jurisdiction to try Trump, because he's a former president. Now, seven Republicans rejected that; all 50 Democrats rejected that. It was a 57-43 vote to convict him of inciting a violent insurrection against the Union, which was the most widespread bipartisan vote in American history to convict a president. And of course, you know, Trump is bragging about the fact that only 57 senators voted to convict him of that. He beat the constitutional spread in his way. But I think that he's met his match now in a special counsel who is holding him to the letter of the criminal law.
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Yeah. I mean, we know that there is a lot of, you know, influence in Washington that's based on people's family connections --
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-- and family ties.
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You know, and I have repeatedly asked Chairman Comer on the Oversight Committee for us to look at that in a serious and substantive and methodical and nonpartisan way. But he's instead decided to just pursue the Hunter Biden thing as a one-off as a way to score cheap political points. He doesn't want to talk about Jared Kushner, who brought back $2 billion, not million, $2 billion from Saudi Arabia to a company he created the day after the Trump administration ended, when there was still blood all over the Capitol.
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Well, it's a great question. I wish that Lincoln were around to pose it to him because it's his political party that they've dragged into the mud here. I mean, that was a pro-freedom, anti-slavery, anti-know-nothing, pro-immigration party, and now it's become a cult of authoritarian personality. And, you know, even the candidates running against Trump dare not challenge his clear betrayals of his constitutional oath. Donald Trump knew exactly what he was doing, and we had lots of testimony about that before the January 6th Committee. His own White House counsel told him that he was wrong. The attorney general of the United States, who was, like, the biggest sycophant of the Trump administration, said the arguments he was following were BS. And so he had to have known. Sixty federal and state courts rejected every argument about electoral fraud and corruption they brought forward, and still he went ahead. And even if he did believe it, as his lawyer's saying, which I don't think he did, but even if he did, it makes no difference. You might believe that your bank owes you some money; you don't have a right to go rob the bank.
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Thanks so much for having me.
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