MSNBC "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" - Transcript: "IThe Washington Post reports."
Interview
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LAWRENCE O`DONNELL, HOST, MSNBC: The jury for the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump has already been selected. The voters did that in the United States Senate elections. If the House of Representatives votes in favor of one or more articles of impeachment, that bill of impeachment will be sent to the United States Senate for the trial of Donald J. Trump. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court will be presiding in that trial and all 100 members of the Senate will sit as jurors, who in the end will vote yes or no for the conviction and removal from office of President Donald J. Trump. We`re joined now by one of those potential jurors, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is also the author of Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy. Senator Whitehouse, we now have more votes than the Democrats need in the House of Representatives to send a bill of impeachment to the Senate.
SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D-RI): Correct.
O`DONNELL: Do you expect that, by the end of this year, that bill of impeachment on this phone call will show up in the side?
WHITEHOUSE: I don`t know. And as somebody who`s been in the prosecutor business, I`d be concerned about the House putting a deadline on its work, which would give a deadline for the Trump forces to delay and stall beyond. I think the transcript is extremely damning. But if I were a prosecutor and were given that transcript, it was a wiretap - an organized-crime wiretap transcript, I would say to the agents who did it, this is great. There may even be some high fives in the room. But now, let`s go out and let`s pin down these 15 or 20 things. So I hope that the House does its job, because I think that the Republicans are in a tough spot in the Senate, and a well and meticulously researched and proven case could be a very different thing than the partisanship you see right now.
O`DONNELL: I know, when you were a prosecutor, one of the things you have to worry about protect against is witness tampering.
WHITEHOUSE: Yes.
O`DONNELL: We just heard what the Acting Director of National Intelligence
said about the whistleblower today, whistleblower did the right thing. Let`s listen to what Donald Trump said about the whistleblower today.
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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I want to know who`s the person that gave the whistleblower - who`s the person that gave the whistleblower the information? Because that`s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days, when we were smart, right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little bit differently than we do now.
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O`DONNELL: So the penalty for treason is death?
WHITEHOUSE: Yes, hanging or a firing squad.
O`DONNELL: It seems the President knows that much of the law anyway. What do you make of comments like that? Because the people who helped the whistleblower with the information that the whistleblower delivered, and we know from the whistleblower`s report that he had help with the information.
WHITEHOUSE: Yes.
O`DONNELL: Some of those people are--
WHITEHOUSE: But we also know from the whistleblower`s report that he got that information through the ordinary effort of interagency work that is a part of what goes on in the White House every day.
O`DONNELL: Donald Trump is saying that`s treason today.
WHITEHOUSE: He`s saying that they`re spies, when spies are people who take information and give it to foreign governments. These people kept the information within the government. They were working for the US government. So he`s almost unhinged in this comparison to spying, and in his suggestion that there was anything improper about the way in which the whistleblower got the information. He got it through the ordinary process of interagency information exchange.
O`DONNELL: What do you make of the process that Speaker Pelosi outlined this week, six Committees doing their work? Tonight reports in The Washington Post indicating that the primary work now, this is unusual for impeachment, will be done in the Intelligence Committee because the primary focus is going to be on this phone call.
WHITEHOUSE: Well, I hope they find ways to spread it around where they can, so that you`re not backing up the Intelligence Committee and they get stuck behind subpoena non-compliance and things like that, that you spread it out as much as you can. Because I think there`s a prospect that you can get Republican Senators to vote in favor of impeachment on a well pled meticulously researched case. But we`re not there yet. And at the moment, I think we`re at a very partisan place in the Senate. So there`s homework to be done on the House side to make this a winning case. I think they can do it, but I would urge them to spread the work and be all hands on deck.
O`DONNELL: Now, as a litigator yourself, when you - this is basically the first kind of hearing in the case today.
WHITEHOUSE: Yes.
O`DONNELL: Senator, kind of in criminal process, sort of a preliminary hearing.
WHITEHOUSE: Yes.
O`DONNELL: Not one word of defense about what the President said--
WHITEHOUSE: Of the actual conduct.
O`DONNELL: --on the phone call. When you go into court and you discover that the defense has literally nothing to say about the prosecution`s evidence, not one word, that has to be--
WHITEHOUSE: Not to mention one of your lead witnesses, the Director of National Intelligence, has heavily corroborated the whistleblower, said that he was in good faith, connected the elements in the whistleblower complaint exactly to what turned out to be the case in the actual transcript. I mean, this was not a good day for Team Trump preparing for an impeachment trial.
O`DONNELL: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, thank you very much.
WHITEHOUSE: Good to be with you, Lawrence, thank you.
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