Are you living in fear of Elon Musk's sword tonight?

Well, first of all, we don't live by the sword.

We live by the truth and we live by the law and the Constitution.

So his premise is wrong.

I'd not heard this before.

You just played it.

And, you know, my first reaction was I was trying to remember something that Thomas Jefferson said back.

Will he be able to evade congressional subpoenas simply by deciding to live outside of the country?

The president and the executive branch of government have nothing to do with the administration of federal elections.

That's reposed in the state governments, and Congress has the power in Article I to supplement the primary state authority over elections by regulating time, place, and manner.

Congress has not done that, so there's no federal law that empowers the president to get involved in any way.

And I just saw the headlines, the whistleblower saying they're already jumping way ahead to start to put the technology together to have their barcodes on the ballot envelopes and the reverse ballot envelopes.

I mean, this is an utter transgression against the Constitution.

They don't have the right to do it, and they're setting us up for more chaos as they, you know, created chaos on January 6th of 2021.

But the judge found that we, although we've passed things like the Civil Rights Act of, uh, 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and we created the Election Assistance Commission, never did we give the power, much less, uh, the duty to the executive branch of government to compile a list

listOf, uh, undocumented or illegal voters in the country, and then to either compel the states to participate in this matching program or simply to send it out there to try to contradict what the states are doing.

So it's a completely lawless venture that they're involved in.

And as you're saying, it's a completely slapstick comedy at this point with them sending out USB drives.

When I read that, I thought to myself, "Every time somebody sends me a USB drive, there's a warning that says, 'Please do not open this if you cannot trust-"

What, what do you think this is, the goal is here? They keep losing in court, to your point.

Yeah, I mean, they're throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if something will stick.

Uh, they're trying to scare people, obviously.

So my two part question for you on this is, first, do you have an update as to whether or not the trip is still on? And then secondly, what reasons have they supplied for why he would go and why are you so concerned about it?

Well, there are rumors now that they are rethinking the trip and he may have decided to call it off, but nothing has been confirmed by the administration at this point.

They've never disclosed why they're going, what the purpose of the trip is and what could not be transacted.

you know, by telephone or by messages back and forth.

And nobody even knows why they are involved with them.

Patel has wanted to tighten up his relationship with the Russians.

We know he's been very soft.

What are you hearing while you're campaigning?

Um, first just your reaction to the, to this raid, which to me seems, even in the context of things we've seen, uh, e- an escalation from Trump in terms of targeting, uh, political critics and opponents.

Yeah, I mean, w- we're totally outraged about this, Chris.

Um, of course, we've seen them go after other colleagues of ours like Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio and Maggie Goodlander and Adam Schiff and LaMonica McGeever and Mark Kelly.

I mean, so she's, she's in a distinguished lineage of our colleagues who've been targeted by the administration.

But to do this, uh, within that 60-day window where the Department of Justice traditionally has said, "We will not take overt prosecutorial actions against people in the electoral process 60 days before an election," and they, you know, they just totally threw caution to the winds on that one and damned the torpedoes.

And they've, you know, they've been trashing her and vilifying her and demonizing her for a long time, and the members are very upset about what is going on, and it's an assault on the speech-and-debate clause.

It's an assault on First Amendment values.

Is there a cost to using the department and the government in this way?

So my two-part question for you on this is, is first, do you have an update as to whether or not the trip is still on? A- a- and then secondly, what reasons have they supplied for why he would go, and why are you so concerned about it?

Well, there are rumors now that they are rethinking the trip, and he may have decided to call it off, but nothing has been confirmed by the administration at this point.

Uh, they've never disclosed why they're going, what the purpose of the trip is, and what could not be transacted, uh, th- you know, by d- telephone [laughs] or by messages back and forth.

And nobody even knows why they are involved with them.

Uh, Patel has wanted to, uh, tighten up his relationship with the Russians.

We know he's been very soft on Vladimir Putin and his authoritarian, fascistic regime for a long time.

We know that he got $25,000, uh, to work with a Kremlin, uh, linked film producer to make a documentary about Donald Trump.

Where do you think they should start, and what do you think it should look like?

Trump very much and has been whitewashing January 6th.

Well, I mean, his whole political coalition, or the remnants of it anyway, um, [clears throat] congregate around the idea that he won the 2020 presidential election, which, uh, Joe Biden won by more than seven million votes, three hundred and six to two hundred and thirty-two in the Electoral College.

Um, and then, then he spun up, uh, and incited that violent insurrectionary mob to surround the Capitol as we were trying to engage in the peaceful transfer of power and to try to buy time for his inside political coup to work.

Of course, they were trying to get Vice President Pence simply to reject Electoral College votes from Michigan, from Pennsylvania, from Georgia.

And when Pence, quite honorably, refused to go along with it, um, at that point it was just a, a violent struggle for power.

But yes, they are trying to suppress and whitewash that history.

That's why it was very important for us and for Speaker Pelosi to create the select committee on the January 6th attack, where we had a bipartisan committee that did more than a thousand interviews, um, more than a million pages of, uh, transcripts and documents, and, uh, and we had these public hearings, uh, which, you know, went on for a period of several months.

As top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, what do you think of him still having his face on the Department of Justice's façade?

And please, share with us.

Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation.

I'm delighted to be with you, Danielle, and with all of these distinguished media and newspaper people from all over the country.

Yeah, this last week, I think, offers a number of instructive lessons.

One is that the press is clearly under attack.

And it also shows us the right way to respond, which is with solidarity and unity across lines of different kind of media and different politics, right? And so it was, you know, both CNN and MS and Fox and everybody standing together.

That's a recipe for victory.

What's your plan if it goes in that direction?

Congressman, what did you make of this report and also the president's reaction to it?

Well, the conflict of interest is, of course, between Trump and what is supposed to be his constitutional and fiduciary duty to the American people and his relationship with Russia.

After all, a Russian oligarch just paid for his son's wedding festivities.

But to me, it looks like really a convergence of interests between these lobbyists and Donald Trump because they basically take the side that objectively helps Russia and Putin under any circumstances.

I mean, Donald Trump has been systematically undermining the basic alliances of the United States with NATO countries, with our strongest Democratic allies around the world, including Canada, which he has been vilifying and which he slapped a 50 percent tariff on.

And now Canada is boycotting the United States.

But essentially, Trump has aligned himself with Russia and with China.

Why do you want the Smithsonian to preserve that stuff?

Are the questions that I have raised hyperbole or conspiracy theorists, or do they make some type of sense?

Totally legitimate.

First of all, I didn't even know that that Russian republic existed.

It sounds like a political slush fund for Putin to shovel money out the door to get to American Republican campaign consultants and to Trump world.

But it was interesting to me when Trump said that he would.

deal with them accordingly if he found that there was a conflict of interest.

There's not a conflict of interest.

But Democrats also need to show accountability that they're going to hold them accountable and that they can move the agenda.

[laughs] Yes.

And that's where we are with Trump right now.

I mean, he's just, you know, he's just left us in the dust here.

But I, I'll say this.

He, when he said he was gonna pay, um, what he indicated was his super PAC would pay.

And of course, anybody who knows anything about campaign finance law knows that it's not his super PAC.

It's supposed to be supporting him, it's spending money for him, but not only is he not allowed to control it, he's not even allowed to coordinate with it.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Uh, and, you know, he asks the wrong question when he says, "Is it partisan?" Of course it's partisan, but that's not even the legal question.

The legal question is, is it propaganda? And that is specifically banned by Congressional Appropriations Acts.

And also, you cannot have federal government workers paid for by the taxpayers working on political propaganda and blatantly political commercials.

One of those commercials was a, was literally a 2024 campaign ad that Donald Trump did that they just dressed up as, uh, a government public service announcement.

I mean, a PSA, we know what that is.

For example, they should be running PSAs about the fact that the measles are back and are an epidemic now in parts of Pennsylvania, and people need to get vaccinated.

Or what-

Unravel that reporting for us, and like, what, what your takeaway.

So there's a fundamental conflict of interest that's at the heart of this thing.

Uh, he's been a war maker, uh, and a war monger, as Donald Trump would put it.

And then, then now he's a peace envoy in a volunteer capacity.

And he thinks because he describes himself as a volunteer and he's not getting any kind of salary, it's okay for him also to be getting billions of dollars from Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, and from the other oil monarchies in United Arab Emirates and Qatar, and so on.

It's an absolute irreversible, um, just unchallengeable conflict of interest to be acting as a representative of the US government with all of these governments, whether he's championing war, or now he claims to be championing peace and, uh, a ceasefire and so on, while he's representing them and taking billions of dollars from them.

It just doesn't make any sense.

Mm-hmm

I hear you.

Yeah.

But look, I mean, as ever with MAGA, we are saved from their absolute malice and evil by their complete incompetence.

I mean, they went in with the idea of setting a perjury trap for Jack Smith.

And in fact, he, Senator Schmidt, basically pronounced himself the victor in the middle of his little tirade there and that Jack Smith had already perjured himself, which was clearly his entire aim.

It was completely sinister, but also totally inept and incompetent.

And now he's trying to laugh the whole thing off after pronouncing Jack Smith a dirtbag.

In the context of Jonathan Swan saying we only know 5% Do you have a list of things that you are immediately going to subpoena or try to get records for or investigate?

Her vision seems to have really cleared up about Donald Trump.

Well, her voice is very important.

Her voice is very important, Lawrence, because, you know, when you run a campaign ad and that campaign ad was paid for by the taxpayers, you have to end it by saying, I approve this message.

And she clearly disapproved of this message.

And I think the vast majority of the American people disapprove of this message.

And, of course, it's not just, you know, as Senator Kennedy was saying, that he doesn't think The taxpayer money should go for political purposes.

It's against the law.

Would that be something we can expect to know a few months after you take control of the House of Representatives?

But the, the most, the two most successful years of Donald Trump's business career are the first two years of his second term of the presidency, and you've recently calculated just how lucrative it has been for him.

I mean, it's more than a million dollars an hour.

It's like $1.1 million an hour.

That is charitably speaking because you've got to assume a 40-hour workweek as opposed to a four-hour workweek or a four-minute workweek.

Um, but in any event, with a four, 40-hour workweek, he's making more than a million dollars an hour, which means that he makes more, he makes double in one hour of his private corrupt endeavors that he makes in an entire year as president of the United States, 400 or $450,000.

Um, so look, it's very clear the whole thing is a money-making operation, and the entire country is now regarding with amazement the fact that our government has been turned over to a guy who is in it solely to make money for himself and his family.

So of course, there's no progress on healthcare for America.

[laughs] Yes

Congressman, your reaction to this ruling?

Well, I feel like the Supreme Court was not willing to do the right thing twice in a row.

President Trump exploded at them when they shut down his post office scheme to take over the elections and berated them and worked the refs.

And now they came back with this decision.

Look, this is the creation of a massive federal government database of which they've been trying to do since Doge, since Elon Musk.

Congress rejected this whole idea in the SAVE Act.

Congress has not wanted to have anything to do with this, and yet they've now allowed the federal government to set it up and allowed the states that want to opt into this to use this system.

Is it your sense that the states are prepared to respond if this administration tries to use this system in order to purge voters?

I wonder, as we sort of start to sift through the damage that Trump has done, how would you assess the amount of damage, the capitulation, and the practice, and the normalization of capitulation? How much damage do you see that having done?

Oh, it's pervasive, and it's wretched, and, uh, it's gonna take America, uh, many years to dig our way out of the wreckage.

I mean, just look at what he's done to the Department of Justice, which is much better described as a Department of Injustice today.

It's just an instrument of the president's political vengeance and the president's political will to attack his enemies.

And you think about the number of people who've been falsely accused, falsely investigated, falsely prosecuted.

You know, James Comey, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Maggie Goodlander, Jason Crow.

It just goes on and on.

[laughs]

What should people understand about

that? The code, c'est moi.

It's not him.

um just read the constitution his job under article 2 is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed not twisted distorted rewritten he's got to execute the laws passed by congress and article 1 is very clear that in addition to us having the power to declare war to set taxes and tariffs to regulate commerce domestically and internationally we also have the power to regulate federal buildings and the construction of federal buildings so he doesn't control the White House or the Kennedy Center or the reflecting pool, which, you know, we call the Strait of Warm Ooze now that he's poisoned it and turned it into a toxic algae farm.

All of that belongs to Congress.

So it's just delusional for him to say that.

And the courts cannot move fast enough to slap him down with injunctions every time that he decides he wants to desecrate another federal building or another federal monument.

But what are these Trump allies who are pushing him to declare a national emergency? What are they missing about what his powers actually even would be?

There's no guarantee you will like what you're being covered around, as long as it's informative to the public.

Look, you- d- he has a cellphone that a lot of people seem to call up.

A lot of people seem to have his number.

If he wants to block CNN or MS on or [laughs] Politico on his personal cellphone, he's got a right to do that like every other citizen.

But what we're talking about is the use of government resources, government offices, and government property to discriminate based on political viewpoint.

And that doesn't mean that every media entity in the world gets to go to those press conferences.

I mean, there, he could set some reasonable content-neutral, viewpoint-neutral regulations based on the size of the media entity or the reach of the audience or something like that.

Um, why do you think this particular story is breaking through to Republicans in ways that others have not?

Mm-hmm

... for the Reflecting Pool job down at the Strait of Warm Ooze.

Um, they really have converted the Department of Justice into an instrument of political attack and revenge.

Uh, and their own, a lot of their own US attorneys have left because of it because they've said, "We can't bring cases based on nothing." But Donald Trump doesn't mind doing that.

He'll take it as long as, as long as it will go.

And so a lot of his lawyers have started to get in trouble.

I mean, you know, people like Rudy Giuliani who, uh, has been kicked out of the bar for what he did, and a lot of the lawyers are starting to say, "I'm [laughs] not going down the, that road with these people." And that's a positive sign that the judges at the district court level and appeals court level are hanging so tough that the lawyers are getting afraid of just collaborating with perjury and obstruction of justice and lying in court

Every self-respecting media entity in America should boycott what's left of the White House if he keeps violating press freedom." What is at stake here?

Mm-hmm

... because now each state can proceed with the election that's been designed by its own legislature and by its governor and by its secretary of state and board of elections.

And that is how electoral federalism is supposed to work.

The Congress can, uh, can kind of supplant the legislatures, uh, as to the time, place, and manner of elections if we act in time to make that sensible.

But of course, we haven't tried to alter it in any way.

And so Donald Trump and the post office were flying so low and way outside the Constitution here.

So let us hope that the executive branch of government will now just acknowledge- That the midterm elections, uh, are unfolding as we speak.

Well, good point.

And Raskin spoke with Scott McFarland Reports about his in-demand campaign surrogacy.

I think we've been to 23 or 24 states now and I'm headed out, I think, to New Hampshire.

Is that next? New Hampshire, Arizona, Maine.

So look, anywhere that I'm invited, if they tell me I can actually help make a difference, in terms of assembling voters, reaching out to independents and Republicans, mobilizing Democrats, raising money for people, I'm going to do it.

I think we've raised and given away more than $3 million in this campaign.

And

Any moments stick out to you when you're on the road in the last few weeks?

Well, sure.

Any moments stick out to you when you're on the road in the last few weeks?

Well, sure.

I mean, a lot of them do.

I mean, I brought back a lot of perceptions about what's going on.

You don't see any MAGA hats anywhere in the country anymore.

So the support for the Republicans is melting away.

in the rural areas are especially revved up to get rid of mega rule in Congress.

That's far north.

Um, a lot of people are, are doing valiant things in the political arena to try to save our democracy, and I wonder how those thoughts sort of sync up with or contrast with the conduct of our current presidential administration.

administration.Yeah, well, it is a day when Americans are thinking and remembering about that extraordinary act of savage terror unleashed against us by, uh, religious fanatics and state-sponsored terrorists.

Um, and the response that the country had was, um, reaching out and compassion and empathy for the victims and for their families.

And, um, you know, I see so much of the history of our time as being like that.

There are these, you know, savage assaults on America, as in 9/11, or on our institutions, and then we have networks of pragmatic hope, of people getting together, um, to try to return to the basic values of the country and to try to find a way forward.

So I found Bobby Roth's, uh, film really beautiful in showing those networks of hope and mutual solidarity that have been getting people through these really tough times.

Mm-hmm

... that part of the Constitution, and this law, and so on.