Transcript: Raskin Says Dems Must Use Funding Fight to Restrain Trump

Bacon: Last question. I guess you, Congressman Crockett, a few others are on this. So the Republicans have this new “we’re going to reinvestigate January 6” committee that that you’re going to be on now.

Talk about what you can do there and how you can prevent this from being an overturning of history and a whitewashing of history, which is I assume what they want it to be. 

Raskin: Well, we won’t let that happen. We’re there to refute and debunk all of the lies and conspiracy theories.

But look, the truly bipartisan select committee on January 6 worked on this for more than a year and a half. We interviewed more than a thousand witnesses. We looked at more than a million documents and we released a report which has just been completely unrefuted and untouched by the right wing, despite the fact that they have engaged in every effort to try to oppose it. They wanted to say it was really antifa, it was really FBI agents—anything but what actually happened, which is Donald Trump incited a mob that came down and engaged in massive violence against our police officers. We had more than 140 officers that were wounded, injured, hospitalized, disfigured, forced to retire from the force because they’re disabled. 

That whole mob insurrection was surrounding an internal coup, an attempt to get the Vice President of the United States Mike Pence to reject electoral college votes, which is not part of the Constitution, which is not part of any federal law to return electoral college votes. So he would either end up declaring Trump won the election magically, or more likely kick the whole thing into the House of Representatives for a so-called contingent election under the Twelfth Amendment. And there we would’ve been voting not on the basis of one member, one vote but one state, one vote. And they knew that they controlled 27 state delegations.

We had 22. Pennsylvania was tied with nine members on each side. So Pennsylvania’s vote would’ve just been written off. It would’ve been 27–22 unless, of course, Liz Cheney, as the at large member of Wyoming, had decided to stick with the actual vote. But even then, they would’ve won 26–23. Then they were prepared to have Donald Trump ride in and declare his victory. And at that point, after hours of rampaging violence against the police and chants to hang Mike Pence—hang Mike Pence—he would’ve called in the National Guard to put down the chaos he’d incited against us. And maybe he would’ve even.… Who knows what measures he would’ve imposed at that point. But that was where they were headed. That was the claim.