CNN "Erin Burnett Outfront" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Whitehouse

Interview

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BURNETT: OUTFRONT now, Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

All right. Senator, wow, I mean, it's been 18 months. I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of pages and people. OK, re-creating the Mueller probe, is that a serious threat?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D-RI), JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: Well, I think having to do a lot of independent investigation would become necessary if we didn't get meaningful access to the Mueller report, and where necessary, even to some of the statements and evidence behind the report. This is not the ordinary type of criminal prosecution in which the department is properly jealous of its prerogatives and does not let members of Congress into the investigative process. This is a special process involving the president of the United States and the special counsel statute and related to impeachment, potentially.

So we're playing I think by different ground rules. And those ground rules ought to include full cooperation with the Congress. BURNETT: All right. You mentioned the word impeachment. The House

Judiciary chairman, so, if your colleague over in the House, Jerry Nadler, spoke to CNN about impeachment today. I wanted to play for you what he said, Senator.

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BURNETT: Are Democrats trying to have it both ways on this impeachment issue right now, Senator?

WHITEHOUSE: That's not the way I think of it. I've spent a lot of time in court rooms and doing prosecutions. There's an order of proceeding. The first thing you do is you put your evidence together. And then you make your case. And then you will ask for the judgment that you seek.

In this case, the judgment that would be sought would be to proceed with an impeachment. But the House is newly under a Democratic control and I think they deserve time without having to discuss impeachment yet --

BURNETT: Yes.

WHITEHOUSE: -- to look at the evidence and put together a case to the American people. A very important piece of that will be the Mueller report. The Mueller report could conceivably be sufficiently damming that there is brought bipartisan sentiment that this president needs to be remove removed, or not. We just don't know that yet.

BURNETT: So, that's the crucial thing, is you used the word "bipartisan". Obviously, the House speaker used it yesterday, too, and just to make it clear, people -- some people watching, they think the president should be impeach, some may not. But you can obviously impeach him in the House but he would stay in office because it comes to you in the Senate.

WHITEHOUSE: Right.

BURNETT: You need 20 Republicans on board, right? That's the bipartisan that we're talking about.

WHITEHOUSE: That's technically the bipartisan that we're talking about. I suspect that the House leadership would also like to see the impeachment vote in the House be bipartisan as well.

BURNETT: For the optics.

WHITEHOUSE: So that people can proceed, kind of in the good faith feeling that we're doing our constitutional duty and not running a political errand.

BURNETT: OK. But do you really think that if this is something short of an all-out conspiracy, a specific crime, an indictable crime. That you could get 20 of your colleagues on board? Do you have any idea what the bar is from your conversations with them?

WHITEHOUSE: No. Not really. But, you know, in many cases, you go back to the Republican effort to impeach President Clinton, the bar was pretty low there. And the Senate rejected it. So, it has to be a higher bar than that. That's one thing that we know.

BURNETT: All right. I want to ask you about something as well, Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8, as you know, that horrific crash, 157 people onboard were killed. Obviously, now, that aircraft has been grounded by aviation authorities and airlines across the world, but not here. The FAA just released a statement saying that it can keep flying here.

They don't know what went on. They've recommend a software. Boeing is putting a fix in with response to Lion Air before they even know what happens with this.

Do you think the plane should just keep flying?

WHITEHOUSE: You know, I'm not an aviation expert. I do think that when the rest of the world is saying we need to get to the bottom of this before we let this plane fly, that puts a lot of pressure on the FAA to undertake a very serious and very rapid investigation.

[19:35:00] Unfortunately, what we see so often in the Trump administration is regulatory agencies that take their signals from big industry.

And we want to make absolutely sure the fax is not trying to keep these planes flying, even though they're not safe, just because Boeing and airlines want it that way. So, that is a notion that has to be dispelled once so many other governments have made the more cautious step of grounding the aircraft.

BURNETT: All right. I appreciate your time, Senator. Thanks so much.

WHITEHOUSE: Good to be with you.

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