The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jamie Raskin on the Facts of January 6th, and the Danger Ahead

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, serves on Congress’s Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the Capitol.  He spoke with David Remnick about the effort to demonstrate Donald Trump’s culpability in the insurrection in a way that would resonate with voters, and about Trump’s political future.  Trump is “guilty as sin, and everybody can see it,” Raskin says, and he is running low on patience for the Department of Justice to act.  “As a citizen, I would hope and expect to see action,” Raskin notes, given the committee’s findings. “But I try to be careful not to browbeat the Attorney General of the United States.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In February of last year, I sat down with Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland. He was serving as house manager for the second impeachment of Donald Trump following the insurrection of January 6th. It was a time of unbelievable turmoil for the nation and for Raskin himself. He'd just lost a son to depression and suicide. On January 6th, his daughter and his son-in-law had gone with him to the Capitol, and they ended up trapped in an office barricaded against the mob.

Raskin has been serving as a member of Congress's January 6th committee, a committee that's trying to change the minds of Americans who still believe in Donald Trump and his colossal attempt at national deception. I spoke with Jamie Raskin right after their final scheduled hearing. Congressman, in the last hearing, we were shown. how the president sat for hours watching television as a mob that he'd inside it tried to stop the election. What have you accomplished with these hearings overall and what's ahead for the committee? Our assignment under House Resolution 503 is to define the events of the sixth, define what the causes were, but then to map out a series of legislative responses to them to fortify American democracy against coups, insurrections, political violence, and other attempts to usurp the will of the people.

So we're still in the middle of our work. We're hoping that we're moving into the final phase of it, but we still do have investigative leads and lines of inquiry that we're going to pursue, and then we have to make these recommendations, and we don't have a lot of time to do it in. What is the time limit, and why is there a time limit? Is it the election? Well, there's a time limit because the House of Representatives, unlike the, U.S. Senate is a non-continuous body. All of us are up for election every two years. And so every time when we come back and create a new Congress, we have to adopt a whole new set of rules. We have to adopt a whole new set of committees and subcommittees and so on. So we're like, you know,

Cinderella's gown and slippers, you know, when we get to the end of this Congress, we're done for. It's over for us. So much so that if the Democrats lose the House to the Republicans, I believe you can expect counter investigations, counter hearings, all kinds of political backlash, don't you think? Well, perish the thought that's the premise of that question, but yeah, I mean, they are saying that if they get the House back and we know that they're measuring the drapes, they don't seem to have noticed that the entire country is an absolute backlash against their extremist right-wing politics and what the Supreme

court has done to the rights of women and men and families. So, you know, I think maybe they've jumped the gun in terms of, you know, appointing Marjorie Taylor Green to this or that committee and so on. You say that with some confidence to face those elections, but I want to know to what degree you think the picture that you're painting, the facts that you're accumulating, have penetrated, a wider audience than, you know, the people that also watch MSNBC or maybe are listening to us now. Is it penetrating independence? Is it changing minds? The polling data that I've seen about this, and I haven't, like, zealously, you know, hunted it all down. But the stuff that people have sent me shows that the vast majority of Democrats,

like 95 percent, understand that the big lie is a lie. It was not a stolen election, and the insurrection was an insurrection, and Donald Trump was behind it. More than two-thirds of independence also understand that the big lie is a lie. They understand that Donald Trump has tried to wage war against our political institutions and our constitutional order, and increasing numbers of Republicans are getting the news I'm seeing. I mean, a political party cannot last,

especially a minority political party like the Republicans if they're going to lose 20 or 25 or 30 percent of their people. I mean, Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney and Adam Kinsiger and, you know, the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach and the seven Republicans in the Senate who voted to convict, they represent some people. They represent millions of people. And that was back when we knew a lot less about what exactly Donald Trump had done. So the truth is a resilient and irrepressible thing. I think that the truth. is beginning to permeate every level of the media, despite the attempt by Fox News and the right-wing media to sweep everything under the rug. But, you know, I've been accused of being an optimistic rose-colored glasses guy, but I just have to believe that the lie cannot last. You mentioned Liz Cheney, and not so long ago, I would not have imagined you and Liz Cheney as political

bedfellas. Tell me about your relationship with her now. Well, I should start by saying, David, I've always liked Liz Cheney very much. We arrived in Congress the exact same year. We both won in 2016. We came in 2017. We have a lot in common. We're both voyeurs. We're both kind of family people. We don't, we're not into that cocaine orgy scene that we've heard so much about from some of our junior Republican colleagues. And I take her to be a very serious, thoughtful person. And she's a constitutional patriot. And she's really funny. And we're able to have a lot of fun. together, you know, even as we are trying to defend our constitutional order. I think that, you know, Liz, like all of us, is on a political journey. She is standing up for freedom. And obviously, and most importantly, she is standing up for the truth in this investigation and insisting upon and demanding that the country and specifically her political party and her political party leadership deal with the truth. She's, she's dealing with the truth, Congressman. And she's, she is likely to lose and probably lose badly in her home state, in her congressional race, as you know.

Well, we don't know that to be the case. The numbers are bad. And I'd like you to describe for us your view of or disappointment with or worse about the general Republican Party who seems either to be in lockstep with Donald Trump and what you're calling the big lie. or they're just so afraid to lose their own seats that they, you know, muddle along. Well, you know, the original generation of Americans, the founders of the country, understood the dangers of partisanship and people getting into a partisan mentality where they begin to act increasingly cultish and they elevate party loyalty and discipline above critical thinking. And, you know, Democrats have done that too. I mean, you know, in the wake of

the Me Too era, I think a lot of Democrats would probably be nervous about somebody going back and looking to see what was being said when Bill Clinton had his various issues. I mean, I'm trying to demonstrate some even-handedness here. I mean, any of us who get into a political party can put blinders on to things that would upset us very much if we saw it happening in the other party. Now, we're obviously dealing with an extreme example here when you're talking about a president of the United States who wages war against our constitutional republic. And that's extreme. And it obviously represents the convergence of a lot of very scary political strains in America and around the world today, of authoritarianism, of racism, of anti-Semitism, of illiberalism.

which a lot of the right-wing Republicans are openly praising now in somebody like Orban in Hungary or Putin in Russia. So that's alarming to me. We have to expose that. But the reason I see our hearings is opening up a huge olive branch in the country is that we've been very clear that Donald Trump knew his big lie was a total lie. It was an effort to deceive. But there were millions of people who fell for it who did not understand that it was a lie. What role do you expect Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice to play going forward? They should play a role of justice and of an independent law enforcement function. And vis-a-vis Donald Trump, do you expect to see action against him? Well, as a citizen, I would hope and expect to see action because, Donald Trump is guilty as sin and the whole world can see it. But I try to be careful not to be

browbeating the Attorney General of the United States and the Department of Justice. And the Attorney General, secondly, also happens to be a constituent of mine. And I don't beat up on my constituents. But look, I think that the great women and men of the Department of Justice, they know crime. They will prosecute a case if there is a predicate of sufficient probable cause. They will bring a case before a grand jury if the offense is sufficiently grave. It's hard to imagine a graver offense than this one. And if we want to deter people in the future from committing the same kinds of offenses. I'm talking with Congressman Jamie Raskin, who serves on the January 6th Committee. More in a moment. What are you hearing from Trump voters in your district who maybe they're not

going to vote for you, but you certainly have interactions with them? I hear from lots of Republicans who say they can't take it anymore, and they're either becoming independence or they're becoming Democrats. I hear from veterans on pretty much a daily basis say this is not what I fought for. This is not what I signed up for. And if, you know, I ever acted the way Donald Trump acted, I would have been court-martialed and I'd be spending the rest of my life behind bars. So a lot of people in the military are appalled and outraged by Donald Trump's outrageous betrayal of his oath of office. You are at the center of impeachment, and now these hearings.

Have you personally learned anything about Donald Trump as a human being that you didn't know in 2016? Well, he is never, ever to be underestimated. He uses all of the resources at his disposal, which are vast in terms of money and political power, fear and intimidation. get his way, and you can never count him out. So he was the mastermind of all of those events, and lots of people that he activated and set into motion were only privy to parts of them. So there are obviously ridiculous and absurd things about him that people like to make fun of,

but I'm not really in that camp. I'm somebody who takes him extremely seriously, and I think he continues to be a very serious threat to our constitutional order and the rule of law in America. Last time we spoke on this program about 18 months ago, you predicted that Trump would become a pariah in this country because of the actions he took on January 6th. How confident are you that this is happening? I believe it is happening. Things are moving in the right direction, but the truth will make him a pariah. You know, the Republican Party has a fateful existential question to face. You know, do they want to double down on this? And there's nothing to do with the truth.

It's got nothing to do with the Constitution. It's just operating out of pure political fear and cowardice and subordinating themselves to the will of the alpha guy. It's amazing to me that he's a figure of partisan loyalty when he wasn't even a Republican for a long time. He was a pro-choice Democrat. He even wanted to run for president on the Reform Party. I mean, he's just a hustler and a con man.

And it's remarkable to me that grown adults, people even in his age group up in their 60s, 70s, 80s, wrap themselves around the lies. What prevents him from doing that again? Oh, well, I'm sure he's going to attempt it again. And of course, he will strike the pose of a populist again. The billionaire from Manhattan, who has nothing but contempt for the people that he's willing to send into battle against the police, will again try to strike a populist pose. I have no doubt about that. That's the ticket for him.

He's going to try to continue perpetrating this fraud on the American public for as long as people are willing to buy it. And that's why I always go back to the founders. They understood that perfectly. If you check out Federalist No. 1 by Alexander Hamilton, he talked about people like Donald Trump who have no respect for the constitutional system and are willing to begin as demagogues pandering to the ugliest prejudices and passions of the crowd, but then end up as tyrants destroying everybody's freedom. You know, I like to say that Donald Trump doesn't understand anything about the founders,

but they understood him perfectly. Right now, his biggest competitor for the Republican nomination, I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves, but we know it's true, is Governor DeSantis. in Florida, how does he resemble or not resemble Donald Trump? Well, at this point, Donald Trump is a little bit less of a problem than Trumpism, because he's created the formula for dangerous extremist politics on the right wing. And DeSantis is not challenging Trump on anything substantive. He just wants to knock him out of the way. He shows the exact same kind of authoritarian politics that Trump does.

does, pandering to racism, homophobia, immigrant bashing, you name it. So I think that it will be some level of progress for Trump to be exposed and discredited and removed one way or another as a threat to the republic. But that's not remotely the end of it if Trumpism is alive and well. And you have, you know, political leaders who adopt a position of no enemies on the right and are willing to, incorporate the most vicious, racist, anti-Semitic, authoritarian, neo-fascist groups in the country. Considering all you've said, and the danger of that is Joe Biden too old to be a second-term president? Should the Democratic Party be thinking about looking elsewhere? I don't think it's a question of his being too old. I think that people in our caucus are very

supportive of all of the accomplishments that President Biden has had. And I've got a lot of admiration and affection for Joe Biden. And you think he's up to the job two years down the line and four years hence? Well, and, you know, that's the question that he's got to ask himself. And that's a question all of us have to ask ourselves because this is not what everybody bargained for. And, you know, whether he is up for this struggle against the dangerous extremists who have taken over the Republican Party. And I noticed that some people are saying, you know, it's time to do some other stuff. I mean, this is tough, hard work every day to go in and to fight people with this authoritarian autocratic mentality.

And people who are willing to lie directly in your face and people are willing to spread propaganda and disinformation and to engage in, you know, ugly ad homonym tactics against people. So all of us have to ask ourselves, you know, are we up for this fight? Congressman, thank you so much. Thanks for having me, David. Jamie Raskin serves on the Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the Capitol. He represents Maryland's 8th Congressional District. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us.

See you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo, Brita Green, Callalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gophane and Puttebole. Along with Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, and Michael May. And we had assistance from Harrison Keithline, James Napoli, and Michael Fillero.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.