Lawrence O’Donnell, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, Rachael Bade & Karoun Demirjian

to Rachel bad and Karen Demursim. We're gonna discuss their new book Unchecked, the untold story behind Congress's botched impeachments of Donald Trump. But first we have MSNBC anchor Laurence o'donald. Welcome to fask Politics, Laurence so o'donald, great to be here. I am so excited. I know it's weird to be interviewed when you interview, but you know, it's just very exciting for me. I might be more comfortable with it this way. I find the interviewer position unnatural. I guess

that is extremely interesting. I've written to you and talked to you about this. I'm like so stuck on this idea that American politics seems to be getting worse. Yeah, well you're stuck on the correct idea. Congratulations, stay stuck there, and it's much much worse. And what's odd about it is unlike cancer, this stuff is supposed to get better

over time. When I was growing up in a thoroughly racist environment in Boston, you know, in the nineteen sixties, you could watch, you know, from the beginning of that decade to the end of that decade something you would call progress, I mean real progress, but it was it was still terrible by the way. You know, by the end of the decade, it was still terrible. But then you moved through the next decade, the seventies, and you know,

things were rough and they were ugly. There was a lot of ugly stuff in there, but it was getting better and enlightenment was either taking over or dominating. And I just mean that, for example, just in the vocabulary of the way the world was, which is which may be hard for people to believe, but you know, in the nineteen sixties and seventies, racist language was the norm in white America. Anti Semitic language was the norm. I don't think they even felt mean in any way when

they were using the N word. That was the word. There was no other word, you know, for a very long time. And I watched people who were stuck in that language move out of that language over a you know, fifteen twenty year period, and I watched life get more liberal. I watched Row versus way it happened. And so I was a kid, so I didn't really, you know, think about in real terms the way life was before Row

versus Way. But but I understood as soon as it happened, you know that it was a big deal, and it seemed inevitable. It's it seemed absolutely inevitable. And you have to know ro versus way it is as you know, early nineteen seventies, just a couple of year years before that, it was ill legal, illegal to sell contraception in the

state of Massachusetts. Okay, the place that everyone thinks is the most liberal place in the planet, And maybe it is, and maybe it was generally more liberal than the rest of the country then, but you know, right up until the late nineteen sixties, it was illegal to sell a condom. Having lived through all that and watched all that, and watched these kind of I wouldn't call them roadblocks to progress,

but slow downs, you know, like the Reagan election. In the Reagan years become a kind of slow down to what would have been happening if Democrats were in office, but really just to slow down, you know. I mean, they weren't trying to reverse anything really that had happened in the progressive Enlightenment era. And so it's always been moving through my whole lifetime. It's always been moving towards this area of more enlightenment and more liberal freedom on

things like you know, reproductive rights and all up. And to see it stopped and to see it reversed is just stunning. And so, yes, it is worse. It is worse right now than it was ten years ago. Yeah. I can't figure out if this is like my personal failing or if it's like a larger failing on the part of all of us. But I do believe that after Trump got defeated, I really thought, Okay, now we can start to put things back together. But the message that the Republican Party got was if you double down,

the base will let you get away with anything. Well, of course, because the kind of elections that are decisive and decisive in the thinking of the losing party are like the nineteen sixty four election. You know, when LBJ just crushes the Republican Barry gold Water on a combination of factors including a massive kind of UH sympathy after

the jfk assassination. You know, Ronald Reagan four Reagan one forty nine states, Richard Nixon won forty nine states on the Republican side, and Democrats, you know, had to seriously rethink what they were doing and how they were approaching it. When it's close, nobody rethinks anything, you know, and it's like what it's what it's like, Oh, if you flip sixty thousand votes in Ohio, John Kerry is president. What that tells you is the Democrats didn't do anything wrong

in that election. They didn't do anything wrong at all. They got, you know, basically the same thing as the other side got, but the other side got the presidency. There was no lesson for Republicans in the last election that they've got to change everything. You know, they came pretty close, and Trump is a tremendous turnout machine for their vote, and so you would have had to see kind of a giant repudiation and you you would have had to see something like you know, Texas flip Democrat.

You know, things like that have to happen if they're going to happen to pull the Republicans off the track there on that. I have a friend, David from who has this theory, and I'm not sure that it is, but it's this theory that if you lose three elections in a row, your party starts to really rethink things that would be this election. I mean, do you think that's fantasyland? I don't think any of our previous formulations work now. And so I get what David is saying.

In the pre Trump era, you could certainly plot that, you know, you could. You could say, look, the Democrats lost three in a row, and then they went with this other concept, which was Bill Clinton. That might be hard for people to realize this, but he was outside of the main stream of the Democratic Party at the time. He was certainly outside of what had felt like the dominant Kennedy version of the Democratic Party, and he was presenting himself as a conservative Democrat. And that was just

Betham amatically considered unlikely to succeed in the primaries. And it did. And that happened according to David's theory, after three losses in a row. But I think the Trump era changes all all predictability. And you know, the predictability of politics used to be like being the local weatherman in San Diego. It was just, you know, there's never gonna be a hurricane, there's never gonna be it's gonna be sunny. It's gonna be in the eighties. And that's

the story for three hundred days a year. And there's gonna be a couple of days of rain here and there, and that's it, you know. And so we've gone from politics being like meteorology in San Diego to it being absolute and utter chaos, and none of the predictive tools work in the era of Trump. So that's a really good point and something I want to talk to you about because so we have all these polls. Now we're in this like anxiety provoking lead up to the election,

to this midterm election. You know how much anxiety I'm feeling about the midterm election? How much we why as I I simply don't allow it. It's it's an active will and um because um it's maddening. You can't figure it out. So you know it's you know, a month ago you're going to get these poles sales at the Democrats have this advantage, and then you're gonna get one that says Republicans have. It's way too complex an electoral you know, chessboard to ever figure out, So I just

ignore it until the election happens. It's it's just, you know, it's one of those things that you can, as I think, I suspect you do, spend most of your day agonizing about it if you allow it, or there's the sanity choice, which is ignore it and vote and hope everyone else does know. It's true. Historically there were times when you

really could trust polls. That is not now. Well, look, the most shocking congressional election in history, by far, much more shocking than anything we've seen in this century, was, you know, Bill Clinton had been president for two years. The House of Representatives had a Democratic margin that was gigantic. I mean just you never even wondered about any votes in the House Representative. You had, you had a bunch of Democrats who you didn't need, you know, to vote.

We had fifty seven Democrats in the Senate and there were very few clothes votes. You've rarely needed sixty votes for. And so we went into that election night, you know, with fifty seven Democrats in the Senate, a massive House majority of Democrats, which by the way, had been the House majority for my entire lifetime at the time. Okay, my entire lifetime. You hadn't had a Republican Speaker of the House since the nineteen fifties. There were no predictions

about the Republicans winning anything. And the Republicans won the Senate and the House. They won the House of Representatives for the first time in my lifetime. And it's impossible for me to describe the shock to you of of what that was. I was working in the Senator time, and the way I found out was Bob Dole's chief staff, who was he was the Republican leader of the Senate at the time, called me up in the middle of the afternoon saying, we won the Senate. And I was

absolutely stunned because no one had predicted it. There's no pundit who can raise his or her hand and say I predicted n So I lived through that. Okay. That is the reason why I have never once, never, once thought about congressional elections since ever, because it's just way too complex. And I saw this, I saw you know, a snowstorm in Hawaii in like the Republicans won the House of Representatives. That was it was just a commandment

that I was not allowed to happen. And so you know, nothing that happens now is nearly as shocking as that in terms of surprising electoral results. No, and I that is a really good point, and I think important. And one of my favorite things about you is that you and I tried to do this too. Though I don't have the same kind of like command of history, but you do have this really important historical perspective which always bring in which is incredibly important because it's you know,

you know, it's how we got here. But I'm curious, like with Marjorie Taylor Green, she was first a sort of I know, I hate talking about her because she's just not a person worthy of wasting time on because but she does show where the Republican Party is right now. Is sort of making overtures to McCarthy already that if Republicans win the House, she's gonna want to be on the judiciary. She's gonna want she you know, she is going to want to be a major player. She's owed that.

How do you think that plays out, and more importantly, I mean, what does that say. It says that the Republicans, Congressional Republicans are the Yippies of the twenty one century.

This is as if you know, Abby Hoffman was Speaker of the House, and you know Jerry Ruben was majority of the you know, because they were just wonderfully fun you know, protesters of the Vietnam War, and they were not the organized They weren't going for the organized, careful demonstrations that would make a point and change people's minds. They were going for chaos, like the camera will be attracted to chaos. We will. We will give them chaos. And so they tried to outdo each other all the time.

You know, the Hippies were always trying to updo what they had just done. You know, their version of a peace protest was to levitate surround the Pentagon and levitate it, and they insisted at work that it went up like an inch or something. So arth Telly Green, It's that stuff was never permissible in politics. You know, in politics, you were doomed if they could ever attach the phrase flip flop to you, if it's ever like well, you know, he was in favor of this, and then he voted

the other way. And with Republicans, you know, since Trump, it has just become this kind of circus act of being outrageous. The reward and the money, the contributions come from being outrageous and outrageous was what Rush Limbaugh discovered. A pot of golden Trump discovered an electoral pot of gold with Republican voters in being outrageous. And the mission of being outrageous is to outrage you. It is to outrage you know, the Manhattan Liberal Democrat. It is to

outrage all liberals. Is to outrage all Democrats, and so it works for them. If Marjorie Taylor Green says some anti Semitic thing and she has done, and you know the Democrats condemned her, that actually works for her and she fundraises of that. Yeah, sadly, that's the poison that centered the system, is that, you know, one of the parties has an electorate. And by the way, it's entirely

the electorate's fault. Okay, Marjorie Taylor Green did not create herself. Okay, the voters of that district said, we want a dangerous lunatic. We think that will be fun. Kelly McCarthy is the most cowardly human being who has ever taken an oath of office, and he's doing what his voters want him to. And so the problem is you've got these seventy million or so American voters who think outrage and Trump is the thing that they want, and that is a disaster

and that is unfixable. The problem is the voters. No, but that's not if we We've had this conversation before. The problem is the voters, yes, but now what, Well, you have to win at the margins. That's the problem. So the struggle becomes you know you're gonna win by one point. There's never gonna be you know, one of these landslide things again. You know that's never gonna happen. So you have to go and win by one point

everywhere you can. And you have to go and win by one point in every congressional district that you can. And very importantly, and this is the part that the media ignores, you have to go and win at the state legislature level by one point in every district that you can. There are some districts in Pennsylvania this year, you know, state legislative districts that can be won by

Democrats by one point. If they do, you know, that has a remarkable effect in the country, which it should not have, right, but the effect that it has is it kind of assures that Pennsylvania won't go insane at some level and try to flip its electoral votes, you know, to a Republican through a legislative action down the road somewhere. It's just gonna be, you know, clinging to the wreckage that Trump has created for the foreseeable decades and trying

to win by one point. Okay, does Donald Trump go to jail? No, Donald Trump will not go to jail because you cannot practically jail a former president. If you sentence a former president to jail, you're sentencing a minimum of twelve Secret Service agents a day to jail. So they're not going to do that. What will happen is if he has given a criminal sentence that includes a fine, and the confinement part of the sentence will be home confinement,

which simply means he can't go do rallies. He basically has been living in home confinement, you know, since the president and he they would also say pick a home you know, because you can't go back and forth to New Jersey and stuff, and so to be home confinement and the Secret Service would then in effect become both his protectors and his jailers. Jesus, you know he'll have to spend summers in Florida. Yes, that's that is prison to Trump. That is correct, that's it exactly, Laurence o'donnald,

Thank you so much for joining us. This is really great, my pleasure. Congresswoman Mikey Sharrell represents New Jersey's eleventh district. Welcome to fast Politics, Mikey cheryld Well, it is great to be a fast politics. I really appreciate you have a me Molly. Yeah, you have to talk really fast. We do this all at wanted to help speeding to go. I love it. I love it. I'm always being taught, you know. I'm from Jersey, so I'm always being told

to slow down. So first I want to talk to you about I'm going to congratulate you for having your district shift to safe democratic. Thank you very much. Not taking anything for granted here, But no, it doesn't feel like that kind of cycle. It just feels like so much is still up in the air. In a way, that my other races did not feel like this, like so much was still so unsettled with less than a month to the election. Yeah, it does feel like that. I mean, do you feel anxiety at all about like

what happened in in the gubernatorial in New Jersey? Oh? Yeah, I think everyone in New Jersey is a little less scarred from that. Yeah, a point where you know, there are people in districts that are far more blue than mine that are spending quite a bit of money. And I was on the floor with them on the house and some somebody from California was like, well, turned to him and said, well, you're fine, right, And he's like, no, I'm spending millions. Like we're all we we all are

really concerned that. You know, the electorate feels very uneasy. People feel oh like that they I mean, let's face it, families have had a really tough couple of years. I have four kids for school aged kids. We've had a

rough couple of years. And I think we're still um, we're still finding our footing even after COVID and then of course to come out of COVID and then have the economy and the economic problems we're having and then as a woman, and I don't think it's just women, you know, as we talked to people across my districts, it's really everyone. But to really feel like the protections and the freedoms that you've enjoyed for fifty years now just suddenly have gone up in smoke. And these weren't

just sort of laws, but but constitutional protections. The feeling that your rights were and should be embedded in our constitution and to see that that's now just gone and your children aren't going to be able to rely on that. And I have, you know, a daughter in high school, you know where is it okay for her to go

to college? Now? I I talked to women, what if you get a you know what if you're doing great at your job here in Jersey and you get a great promotion and they want you to move out to Ohio? Is that okay? I have a ten year old daughter. Do I want to raise a ten year old girl in Ohio? Right now? After we saw the horrible, horrible situation where a ten year old was raped and impregnated and the state basically said the response was that that

child had to bear a pregnancy to term. I mean, I mean these are the things that people are sort of grappling with. Yeah, it's interesting to me because the thing that I don't think Republicans saw coming when they were so hot to take away or bodily autonomy was that doctors would not treat women. And you're seeing this in these red states. Yeah, and yet they're not addressing it.

I mean, this is you know, I remember there was a program I was listening to about a woman who two times had a pregnancy that unfortunately fairly late in the pregnancy, they couldn't find a heartbeat. And I think anyone who's had a child, and many people have had miscarriages, you just know that that devastation and that fear. And so she she had that experience twice, once before the protections under row were lifted in the dab's decision, and

once after. And the treatment at the hospital was night and day between being admitted and being cared for and given pain medication and mental health support. And then the difference was the second time being based sickly sent home and her husband was afraid that she might bleed out and die, and almost no sympathy for that at the hospital. And it's just shocking and and yet when you talk to Texas legislature, you know you hear story from Texas

Texas legislators. Well, that wasn't the attention. I'm sure it'll work itself out. I mean, can you imagine if you're pregnant right now in Texas thinking, oh, okay, just wait till it works itself out, and let's pray to God I don't die in anytime. Yeah, no, I can. And

in fact, we're seeing this in Alabama. We're seeing this in lots of red states where doctors are refusing to treat because they're worried about losing losing their licenses, which, if you go back to seventy three, was the reason that ultimately Row was decided so broadly was because you had doctors who were afraid to trade. You had Republican politicians deciding women's health. So I do think it is

a really important subject. But I even want to get like further into this with you, because you have that, but then you also have like there are some like there are some real extremists in the Republican Party. In fact, forty eight out of fifties states have election deniers running in the Republican Party. I mean how do you like just talk to me about this, like terrifying precipice we're on.

Oh gosh, you know, I'm so sarcastic usually, And when you said there are extremists in the Republican Party, I wanted to say something snarky, but I didn't because it's so scary. It's just not something that you can poke fun at, because it's really really threatening to our country, is really threatening to what we believe in. I think

what people are missing here. And I've been thinking, as you can imagine, because I was on the floor of the house on January six, and I was in the group in the balcony and the gallery we call it, and when that was the last group to be evacuated because on that floor we could not find a safe

route out for a while. And and so I've been thinking, you know, so much about that day and the aftermath, and then watching the hearings and and how intentional all this was and thinking about it, and I think what people are missing, this critical piece that people are maybe taking for granted, is this idea of why democracy is

so critically important. It's and and the reason we respect our founding father so much for for bringing our democracy into being is because for the first time in hundreds of years, there's a group of people putting that much faith in human individuals, saying your voice is important, your thoughts are important, and you, each and every one of you can decide what kind of government you want, who you want in government, what you want to do with

your life, the job you want, you know. After after they came from places and their ancestors came from places with some monarch that was supposedly chosen by God and was better than everybody else in leadership, they decided, no, we're gonna put our faith in humans with the understanding that they're equal and they each have a voice and a right to speak and a right to you know, engage in the marketplace of ideas, so together we can

all come up with a path forward here. And what people seem to me to be sort of indiscriminately willing to throw away is that idea. And and I think people feel in some of these places and on the far right, that they're willing to do it because they're going to get their guy into power, and their guy is never going to leave, and it's going to be some autocracy that that we have to suffer under But I would just direct you to what life is like

under Putin. I would direct you to consider what it's like when you don't like what the government's doing and if you speak out on it, you could go to jail for years, or what it's like when you you don't get to have a free economy. Everything is filter it up to the top to the oligarchs and they take everything and you you can't have any sort of robust economy or middle class. I just I think people

are not taking into accounts sometimes. And this is really a struggle because I grew up during the Cold War and it was so obvious when you looked at the Soviet Union. But people are not understanding what sets democracies apart and why it is worth everything we have to protect it. Yeah. I want to talk to you about January six for a minute, because one of the things you said early on that actually came back, has come back many times, is that you saw a member of

Congress giving a reconnaissance tour. Can we talk about that for a minute. Sure, you have a background in national security, you know what you're talking about. Can you expand on this a little bit? I entered into the military basically when I started at the Naval Academy when I was eighteen. I went to the Naval Academy for four years and

then served in the Navy for almost ten years. And I served in places all over the world, and we would always have security briefings, even you know, in Pencil Caul, Florida, I remember getting a security briefing and, um, you know, you talk about seem strange things if if they're the same person is sort of loitering at the gate for

no reason and maybe taking pictures of odd stuff. Report that, you know that look for the thing that sticks out and seems odd to you and don't assume that it's nothing. You know, you have a duty to report to protect in this case when I was in the military, that you know, national security. And so on January five, the Capitol which had been closed to visitors, and I I don't you know, I think people kind of hear that,

but maybe don't get it. You know. Ben mccadams, who was a member from Utah, had his daughter and my daughter who were the same age, and he was showing them around the capital and he was stopped and told that he could be in the capital. But the two girls couldn't and they were fifteen, they were, you know, not adults, you know, they were they were and Archise said, you know this, this is my kid, this is representative shows and they said, no, it's closed, so they had

to leave. So it's really notable on January five to see these tour groups and to see them going in weird places and the tunnels, you know, and really kind of you know, quite frankly boring places when everything shut, the offices weren't open, and wandering around in these kind of odd places where you don't normally see these kind of groups of tourists, So especially when the capital was closed, and I, you know, I noted it and I thought

it was odd. And then the next day the attacks happened, the attack on the Capitol happened, and people then started reporting, um like I just remember Jim Clyburn saying, and I remember it because it was true. He goes and they came right up to my office, right they knew where the offices were, and you guys don't even know where his office is and where my office is, and you guys can never even find my office. I remember thinking

to myself that's right. I don't know where his office, so I know he was right, and they found it right away, and they had had prior intelligence. So I reported, and I said, and I simply said, I want to know who let those groups into the capital and what

they were doing. And because of that, some representatives filed an ethics complaint against me and the thirty other members who had filed that request, saying we were impugning the reputation of the House for simply asking what those groups were doing in the Capitol the day before it was attacked. And you never named who that congress person was right, because I, to be frank with you saw congress people

and saw groups. And I know full well that if I saw a group of possibly buying supporters, I might say, hey, how are all of you doing today? You know, exciting to see you here? So I wanted an investigation. Sure enough,

the investigation happened with the January six Committee. And then it turns out that one of the people, and this is what just shakes your faith in what's going on in some quarters of the far right, one of the people that was caught on tape giving a tour and one of the members of his tour actually attacked the Capitol the next day. One of those people was Representative

louder Milk, who filed an ethics complain against me. Very louder Milk, that's the shamelessness that you see in certain quarters. Well it makes sense. I mean, that's the thing with these Republicans is like they do stuff like that. I mean, remember Biden gave the speech about election deniers, and immediately they were like, Biden is a Nazi, you know. I mean,

this is just the way they're doing it now. By the way, louder Milk, I mean, these backbenchers who you would never know existed if it wasn't for the fact that they're involved in trying to overthrow the United States government. Has there been any punishment for any of the people not as of yet. Um, we've seen I think the January six Committee doing a really great job getting to the bottom of this. This is why we have to all work so hard to bring people together, because right

now what's troubling is I think that's disqualifying. I think somebody lying about what he was doing in an investigation into why our capital building was being attacked. To me, that would disqualify you from serving in Congress, and certainly seems to be a violation of your constitutional duty, and so you would think the punishment at the least would

be that he would be voted out of office. I don't get a sense that's necessarily going to happen, and so we will have to see going forward, as we continue to gather more information what the repercussions might be. But certainly it is troubling that some of the things we're seeing now are being weighed very differently in different districts across the nation. So talk to me a little bit about your opponent. He looks like a standard issue white guy, but tell me more he does, yeah, that

very short hair. He's sort of not just sort of a standard issue white guy. He's a standard issue Republican right now. And that I mean, his positions are all over the map. He doesn't share the values of my district and New Jersey, you know, despite the fact that he says he is. He's in favor of the court overturning Row, and he's in favor of allowing states to ban abortion with no exceptions. That he is in fact

per choice. How does that work? It sort of reminds me of the Supreme Court justices and their Senate hearing saying that Roe is settled law right, and then getting into office and and just you know, doing whatever they wanted. I mean, he seems to me to be somebody who will whatever he thinks it takes to get into office, and then we'll vote in lockstep with Republicans in Washington. So you know, here in my district, we were impacted worse by the state and local tax deduction cap, worse

than almost any district in the nation. And you know, it really impacts our schools, our ability to fund a public school system. It impacts some of our communities have a real commitment to diversity in my district, and they're very concerned because they're seeing more people of color move out of their district than move in, in large part because retirees can't afford some of their taxes. Right now, Um, we're seeing it hit middle class families. Affordability is and

always an issue here. And so he has complained about UM the state and local tax deduction cap, but then said he's in lockstep with Republicans and said that he doesn't think the federal government should pay state taxes UM in support of salt. So he really seems as if whichever audience or whatever you know, people are telling him, or if he's he's seeing that he's not got a good pathway to win on one issue, he changes what

he's saying. I just want to back up on salt here, because this is a very dumb issue that's near and dear to my heart. Salt was originally crafted by Republicans to punish blue states. Yes, and I'm glad it's near and dear toar heart because I love to talk about salt because I have a bone to pick with anyone who doesn't think that it's a progressive value. Because here's that there are very few states in the nation. I think about six that run a progressive taxation system, and

New Jersey is one of them. And the way we do that is through state and local taxes, which we invest in some of the nation's best public schools, are infrastructure, remediating pollution sites, headstart programs, pensions, um, you name it. We are working hard in New Jersey to make sure that people have a secure economic future and also have a great pathway for their kids and their families here. And we do that through state, local taxes. So this

is taxed income. And because of it, and because our economy is one of the economies that really fuels the nation, we often pay more into the federal system than we get back, unlike states like Kentucky where Mitch McConnell lives, which are always taking a lot of federal support to run the state, or states across the South like Mississippi and Alabama, who take a lot of federal funding to run their states. So this was, yeah, an attack on blue states, an attack on states that run these systems.

And now you're double taxing people. And my favorite thing is how supposedly if we ran our states better, we wouldn't need assault deduction. You know, yeah, if you spend less money on education, you wouldn't need it exactly. Well that's what I say. I say, Well, look, if you want to send your kids to school in Oklahoma, where sometimes the public schools are only going four days a week because they don't have the money, if that's how you want to run your state, then you know there

are states that would do that for you. I mean, even the blue states that don't spend on education have really bad education. And I just think, you know, here's the thing. And here's part of the reason we fund the rest of the nation in places like New Jersey,

because we put so much money into education. And so we have wonderful companies here, but I often ask them because there it is, you know there, it's a high cost of living to be here, And I say, you know, why did you locate your headquarters here in New Jersey? And company after company after company has told me it's because they can't get an educated workforce like they find here. They simply can't find the talented workforce that we have

here in New Jersey. And believe me, we have had companies that have been lured away, you know, by states that have offered them the world because they pay on the snow taxes, because they don't support education, and they don't support um a lot of the things we do here in their infrastructure. And those companies often come back because they just find that the grass is not always greener. Thank you so much for joining us. This was really great. Well,

I really appreciate. I did not know I was going to get to end up on my in my constant desire to defend salt. Rachel Bade and carn Diversion are the authors of Unchecked, the Untold Story beyond Congresses Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump. Welcome to Fast Politics. Rachel, Hello, Happy to be on, Molly and Karen, Yeah, Hi, nice to be with you. The book is Unchecked, and it's the untold story of Congresses botched, impeachment of Donald Trump,

bodged impeachments. So when you guys started this book, did you think you're just writing about one impeachment. Yeah. I was literally sitting on my couch on January six, finishing Part three, one of the final chapters of the book, when the instruction started, and it was just like shocking, and it was like, oh my gosh, there's going to be impeachment talk about this, And of course that's what happened. We had to reopen our book and add a part four.

But it actually worked out well. Not to say January six was good by any means. It was horrible, but the story it continued from what we were sort of the story we were telling before, which is this notion of like Democrats sort of not going all the way to take down Trump, Republicans putting their fealty to the president then former president above their scruples before their scruples, and the same characters that we had been sort of

writing about for a long time. Jamie Raskin Pelosi shift, McConnell, you know their relevant once again, McCarthy, Yes, McCarthy, pential future speaker. I'm curious. There's so much in this book, and they're so oh many scoops. Uh. I think that the first thing we should talk about is this scoop about the first impeachment and the kind of strom and drum on Nancy Pelosi's side. Can you talk to us about that? Either of you are welcome to take that question. Well, um, yeah.

We chronicle how basically Pelosi tried to be this block and bulwark against impeachment for our about nine months really really from the start of that Congress the being of twenty nineteen, when Rashida Sili said, We're going to impeach the deep mother. I don't know how much I can say on the air, but an expletive welcome to expletive land, you can do it. When she basically told all the crowd of support as We're gonna impeach the motherfucker. Plus

you had to squish that out. Then the Mulla report comes out, it has all these insinuations of potential obstruction of justice, and all of a sudden at that point, because part is constitutional lawlines and Congress say wait a second.

And that's the moment when we start chronicling and following Jamie Raskin a group of his friends who are also lawyers in Congress, most of them fairly new members of Congress, saying we've got to do something about this, and going to Jerry Nadler and expecting that he's going to be like, yeah, let's go, and he's like, Pelosi won't go for this.

She's so against impeachment. You're going to have to figure out a way to basically orchestrate a careful mutiny to make it such a strong majority of the Democratic Party that she has no choice but to actually go ahead with this. And we chronicle how there is basically a fight that occurs over several months. It's a political fight

that occurs over you know, statements in the airwaves. It's a legal fight that occurs over the filings that the Democrats are trying to put before the courts to get information from redacted Muller Report, evidence that they think is going to help them create impeachment charges and Pelosi just trying to stop it, stop it, stop it, until it's

too overwhelming and she can't anymore. And it's one of several episodes where Pelosi, you know, has politics on her mind, is worried about doing something that might be boomerang, worried about doing something that's hard votes for her moderate members to take and might jeopardize her majority over what her many people and her conference were telling her is doing the right thing. Yeah, you can't really overstate how much Pelosi's fear of impeachment really sort of impacted and sort

of crippled these two impeachments of Donald Trump. I mean, it was something that as reporters who have covered her for a long time, and at the time of these impeachments, Karen and I were both you know, covering the Hill at this time. You know, we all sort of knew Pelosi at her office hated the idea of impeachment. They were worried again again, like Karen was just saying that it was going to really hurt the Democratic Party, that they could lose their majority, and they just didn't want

to do it. But like we didn't realize at the time. I don't think how that influenced the entire strategy that we saw in terms of oversight of Trump, in terms of pulling punches after she was sort of pushed into impeachment and we can talk about this more on the pod. You know, she put it on a very quick timeline to have everything done by cool smiths so that her frontliners could pivot back to talking about legislation instead of

investigating Trump. You know, she wouldn't let investigators dig deep during the impeachment inquiry on a bunch of allegations against the president, like that he was profiting off the Oval office or campaign finance volations for those hush payments. It

was only allowed to be on Ukraine. And because of that fear again, she made a lot of these choices that we would later learn had significant impact on repelling moderate Republicans who you know, were privately concerned about what Trump was doing, but also they just didn't convince the public. Trump came out stronger after the first impeachment. How how

did that happen? Well, we tell people how So do you think that that if she had made it a wider impeachment and not just about Ukraine, that it's possible he would have actually been removed. Well, we'll never know, obviously, because you can't sort of predict what never happened. But we do show in the book multiple examples of various shortcuts that Democrats took and how they impacted key Republicans

during the first impeachment. For example, Jamie Herrera Butler, who just lost her primary for voting to impeach the second time around, she was really concerned about what Trump was doing in Ukraine, and she actually in the book we show the scene where she stands up and she pushes back on her leadership and says, why shouldn't I vote for an impeachment inquiry? Like she believed what he had done was wrong, And we show how the leaders McCarthy very much spin her up on all these sort of

process issues that the Democrats had. Due process was a big concern. Uh. They weren't allowing you know, the president's lawyers to come in and cross examined witnesses. They were not going to get right, which would have ultimately made him more If you don't allow to process, it means that ultimately it can't work right. Well, it just made you know, it gave a sense for Republicans to argue amongst their fretting members that this unfair process, and so

they were able to keep together. Um. And you know, I think in terms of would it have been different, we current and I have talked about this a lot. We think the second one. You know, if there had been different decisions in the second impeachment, potentially that would have been the one where you saw a conviction more

so than the first. It was always going to be a long shot in the first, but you could have had more Republicans turning against the president and that's what they could have done if they couldn't have secured a conviction at least. But remember it's not just about whether it results in sixty seven votes to convict at the end. It's also in what shape do you leave impeachment after

you're done with it? Right, So you know, if you go through an impeachment where don't fight for your subpoenas in court, where you don't have any buy in from the other side of the high aisle on the initial moves, right where where you rushed through the calendar because not that you know, it's it's that you don't need the time to actually investigate all the different leads what you're

trying to get it done. By Christmas, you don't have to worry about talking about impeachment anymore when they head into the next campaign season. That creates a precedent for the next time of how it's gonna be done. It creates present for cut corners and for pulled puncheons for not using the full weight of Congress's oversight power and their investigative power. If you don't use it, you lose it.

And that's kind of the argument that we're making is that with both of these examples, especially, we're in a state where they've just kind of written the playbook for how to do impeachment light, and that's what people who want to exploit that in the future will be able

to do. The only thing, just to play Devil's advocate here is I mean, there was a moment before the second impeachment where they were like, wow, he just tried to have us all killed, where they might have been willing to, but I mean the first time, like you know, I mean the moment there there were not a ton of reasonable Republicans out there totally agree. You know this. This goes to though you know, do you even try though, right, do you try to get any of the reason of Republicans.

Let's say you go after John Bolton and you have some sort of first hand witness testimony against the president. I don't know if we could actually say that there would have been zero House Republicans that would have gotten on board with that sort of a thing, you know, or that it wouldn't have made you know, Lisa Murkowski so upset about it, or Susan Collins that they wouldn't

have added to the mit Romney vote. Right, But also remember it's not it's not just about you know, are you going to turn a single Republican or not a

single Republican on that. If you're a Democrat and you think, look, the Republicans are all in the bag for Trump, they are never going to come across to our side of the aisle, you have a choice, right, do you do impeachment fast because you don't believe you're gonna win anyway, and do it or do you say, well, we're at least going to do it right even if we lose, so that like the structure and the system and the tool is completely you know, at fighting strength for the

next time if we get another shot, and they made the former decision which tended to compromise the strength that they had going forward or or the president, that will exist for people to actually point to and say, well, if they did it that way, why can't I, for a less good reason, just making a case to the public. I mean, you know, with Nixon, they never actually got to the impeachment vote because they did such a thorough

job of fact finding. It took months, It took court fights, it took the chilens of hours of hearings to get those Nixon supporters to turn against the president. I mean, like, it's not easy stuff. But Democrats didn't even bother trying. So, I mean that's a problem that I think is a really good point I want to talk to you about. John Bolton. John Bolton is a really important witness explained to us what happens here. Democrats, they sort of came

to a crossroads. They had done, you know, in the fall of twenty nineteen, they had called in all these sort of lower level witnesses who had testified that Trump was aware and was actually orchestrating this quid pro quo with Ukraine to try to get you know, leverage taxpayer money to go after Biden, his political adversary, etcetera. But they wanted to get again somebody a firsthand witness, someone from Trump's inner circle who could sort of put the

quid pro quo in Trump's mouth. And there had been sort of this testimony by other official Fiona Hill, you guys remember her. She said that Bolton knew about this and called it a quote drug deal, and he was really concerned about it. And so just knowing John Bolton, Fox News personality sort of the godfather of you know, this very arch conservative, sort of thinking, arch conservative being

in the yokon, etcetera. If they had gone after him and put him on the stands, they could have really turned some heads in terms of the public, Republicans voters to lean Republican, maybe some Republican lawmakers. So they're at this crossroads and they decide not to go after him, And the reason they gave publicly was that, oh, look,

Trump's trying to steal an election. We have to move fast. Well, we have reporting in the book that there's this meeting, a series of meetings, really and the real reason they didn't want to do it is because of Pelosi's calendar, you know, she wanted impeachment done by December nineteenth, and they decided that there was not enough time to go to court to fight for people like John Bolton because

of you know, Pelosi's decision to move quickly. They also thought if they actually fought in court for testimony, that they wouldn't be able to impeach Trump for obstructing Congress, and that was something they really wanted to do. Can you explain that a little bit? So they're thinking on that was obviously Trump had stonewalled Congress over and over again, something he had done that no other president had ever done. Would say he was going to ignore quote all the subpoenas,

and he did. He gave them nothing. And so Democrats wanted to charge him during impeachment with obstruction of Congress, that they have a right to these documents and he

wasn't giving them to them. But the problem they saw, though, was if they actually tried to enforce one of their subpoenas that you know, had been blocked, that there would be this lengthy court fight, and that basically moderate Democrats and all the Republicans would point to this ongoing court battle and say Look, this is still being litigated at the federal judge level, like we there's until a judge rules that Trump has to turn over documents. It's still

up in the air. So therefore we won't impeach him, vote to impeach him on obstruction of Congress. That was a big concern. So Democrats didn't want to give people that off ramp, so they said, forget the court fight. Um, I want to ask you, I have another question about Bolton, um, which is which is this strange story, uh that Senate Republicans knew Trump was trying to leverage you coin aid and uh, can you tell us a little bit about

this story because this is super interesting. I mean sure, Look, John Bolton is somebody who's got a lot of relationships with people in capital health and so remember at the time, there was a lot of stuff going off the rails on the foreign policy front, and he was talking with various members of the Senate, especially about Trump wanting to pull troops out of Afghanistan early, and they were doing everything they could to try to, you know, hold him

back from doing that. And as they were having those conversations, Bolton is also telling them about, hey, there's this other of going on with Kray that you might want to look at too, which meant that figures like you know, Lindsey Graham were clued in early to stuff that was happening.

And Ron and On right, and and Ron john too. Yeah, so they had this early heads up and thought that you know that that is part of what motivated their initial maneuvers to try to undo it before it became really, really, really bad. At one point when Ron Johnson goes to you know, his Democratic counterparts on the Senate Flori to basically be like, I need your help. You need to do something in the appropriations bill because I'm not getting

anywhere with the White House. And so it just shows you that like this was not that surprising, and it was also it shocked and repulsed a lot of Republicans or key Republicans that then would later, you know, excuse and dismiss it. This bit of data is fascinating to me because a it makes me think Ron and On is not an abject moron. And then he's actually, I know you guys are nonpartisans, so I'm not going to ask you. You can just listen to me safe partisan thing.

That's shocking to me like he really was sort of trying to get Trump to do the right thing. I mean, look, Ron Johnson has always been somebody who's paid a lot

of attention to Ukraine. He was in that little he was the only member of Congress I think, in that group that went to Zelenski's inauguration, and so, you know, before he became fully in the bag for defending Trump and protecting him from all accusations of any ill will or doing, he was somebody was pretty active about making sure that Ukrainians got recognized and trying to change Trump,

change Trump's mind about it. So I think in that scene that you're pointing out, you're seeing kind of the last gasps of Ron Johnson trying to make the right thing happen before it's going to become such a political thing that he's going to flip and go to the other side. Yeah, but we should also mention, though, in that same anecdote we have in the book, he's too chicken to call foul publicly himself. You know, he goes to Democrats and we've got a problem, and you call foul.

So I mean, yes, he was concerned, but did he he could have done more publicly, I doted to return, that's Charlie Sykes's name for him, not mine, by the way, okay, Um, I wanted to say one more thing about your question about Bolton and Republicans. I mean, we have reporting in the book that shows and indicates that the real reason Mitch McConnell did not want to call witnesses was because

of a fear of what John Bolton would say. I mean, there was um, you know, he privately him and his staff had been asking the White House like, what do you know about what John Bolton says like or what he knows and what he could say, like is does he have any damaging information that could change the outcome of this trial? And over and over again we showed that Patsy Baloney sort of like dismissed him, don't worry,

like there's nothing there, blah blah blah. And then when that New York Times story breaks in the middle of the impeachment, first impeachment trial, there was this total scramble by Mitch McConnell to sort of right the ship when he was starting to lose his members, who are like, how can we not call John Bolton? Well, he knew if John Bolton came in, they would be in big trouble. So he did his utmost and we have like a thorough TikTok in the book about how he got people

on line to vote against witnesses. This is so interesting. Tell me something in this book that you were like, holy shit, I think. I mean, we've been talking a lot about impeachment one. I think that one of my more holy ship moments really comes from the end of impeachment to you know, we wek chronicle and minute by minute detail about how there was this moment where the Democrats who were prosecuting Trump in the second impeachment trial, got the Senate to vote for them, said saying that

they could have witnesses called witnesses to the trial. And it's like this tale of you know, lost hours basically that could have made everything go in a different direction, where you know, Jamie Harry Butler wakes up on the West Coast to find out, Oh my goodness, yes, I told the world about the conversation Kevin McCarthy had with Trump where he said, well, Kevin, I guess they care a lot about more more about me than you do about on January six, right, But and she knows that

people are trying to call her to get her to testify, and maybe she'll be the opening domino that makes all these other GOP witnesses come forward and fall right. But she calls the House Counsel Doug Letter, the person Pelosi's handpicked to be the lawyer for the House, asks for advice. He won't give it to her. He never passes on the message. Jamie Raskin, she's trying to find a lawyer

to help her figure out what she should do. And then they fold their cards two hours later, and it's like, oh, my goodness, if you'd waited even just twenty four more hours, could things have been totally different? And there's moment and you know, and and had those all those Republicans come forward, the same Republican witnesses that are coming forward now for the January six committee hearings, you know, would that have been enough to change Mr McConnell's mind. And had you

changed his mind, wouldn't have many more Republicans followed. So just these moments where like human failings and and misscommunications and letters that were like romance novel stuff right where it all kind of rides and falls on that, and that's what ends up leading you with a second impeachment precedent for doing it without taking all these measures, it leaves you in a second situation where Trump is acquitted for a second time, And how different could that impeachment

have been? And then just like the setup precedent for the rest of the history of impeachment had been at things, just had there not been those miss connections. That was my holy ship moment too. I mean, like, I remember watching the final day of the trial from my house, and when Jamie Raskin walked on the floor and called witnesses and shocked everybody who thought he was going to just give his closing arguments. I remember running around my house screaming like, oh my gosh, I saw this coming.

I saw the coming. Jamie Watkin is a huge, huge character in our book. He's the guy who's always like, we cannot leave a single stone unturned. We have to do our duty, we have to we have to investigate Trump.

I'll pull all the threads and I you know, I was not surprised when he did that, But then like two hours later, all of a sudden, there folding and our reporting indicates that and we have this in the book, Like there was a lot of pressure on him from Chuck Schumer and Truck Schumer's counsel, who the previous weeks had been basically like outbeating Raskin and his team not to call witnesses and to do it in a certain

way that McConnell wanted the trial to go. The White House turned away and snubbed Raskin's team when they were trying to get, you know, information about whether they could subpoena the Secret Service and would the Biden White House allow that, would they waive executive privileged so they could call in, you know, these Trump folks to testify in the trial, to try to turn Republicans away from Trump in his most vulnerable moment. And again they got snubbed

by the White House. So that was just it's just so surprising because Democrats they talked about January six and how terrible it was for the country, and like it was, it was horrible, and yet when it came to actually trying to do something about it, they folded their cards too early. What about the night of January six, you know, there was there was Jamie Raskin and his friends had

impeachment articles ready to go. They took them to Senny Lawyer and Nancy Pelosi on the House where we document this. What if she had said, instead of no, I'm not going to do that, said okay, let's do this now, when Kevin McCarthy was still angry, when all the Republicans were still hurt, before they had a chance to have Trump and his machine pulled them back from that brink. What if that had been the opening domino. Everything could have been different after that point to so interesting. Thank

you both so much. That was great. Thank you, thanks for having us on, Molly Molly, John Fast, Jesse Cannon. I think we were an early canary in the coal mine of saying that if the House GOP retakes the House in the mid terms, the looney squad, Marjorie Taylor Green, bow Bert and all those freaks are gonna be running things.

Certainly they think so. Marjorie Taylor Green, Polly math scientist, spokes stateswoman, Barrel hogs hog hunter, athlete, scholar, has decided that she leaves that she is the future of the Republican Party, and she has told one Kevin McCarthy that she's gonna have a big job in the Republican Congress if that comes to pass, and she considers herself, she thinks she should be on the judiciary. She feels that people have been quite mean to her, and so she's

owed that by the way, I love these people. She feels she's owed that. She has decided that she is going to get hers. So this is the moment of Fuccory. Kevin McCarthy, a coward and a moron, will have to stand up to Marjorie Taylor Green, who is just a moron. We'll see how this plays out. I mean, good luck to both of them. It's a hard to pick a

side here. Did you see in her debate the other night with Marcus Flowers that she said her husband has all the proof of voter fraud in the election that could overturn the election for Mr tru Is that the husband she allegedly cheated on. That would be him as opposed to her tantric sex guru. Right, congratulations, Marjorie Taylor Green, you earned it again. That's it for this episode of

Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to your the best minds and politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard. Please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.