April 18, 2022

Rep. Jamie Raskin spoke to Chris Hayes about the work of the Jan. 6th committee, and promised an "agonizing and riveting" tale that will come out in the public hearings.

"It seems a lot of people very close to the president have cooperated with the committee, giving testimony," Hayes said.

"Nobody wants to get left behind because the truth is coming out in the way that it's supposed to in a democracy, and it's kind of the way you journalists operate, saying we'll have everyone else speaking to us, but not you unless you decide to come forward. No one wants to get left on the dock," Raskin said.

"But the truth is, the whole country now knows the basic outline of the story. We don't know exactly when every single person was doing at every moment, but we know there was one line of attack which was a violent insurrection, unprecedented in our history, injuring, wounding and hospitalizing more than 150 of our police officers and interrupting the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history."

Raskin talked about a "self coup," which is what political scientists call it when a president tries to overturn the constitutional process during an election.

He also promised, "We're gonna lay out everything we see, but we want people to understand this isn't just like an Agatha Christie novel here. We know who done it. It's a question of going forward, how do we get ourselves fortified democratic institutions and processes against coups and insurrections and subversion in the future."

He said there are "lots" of characters who are not yet known to the public who were involved in this.

"There were a number of heroes who surfaced throughout this process, and we want to make sure we're profiling them as well as the villains of this story. But it's very important to know how it was done as well as whodunnit.

"And that's what the citizens inside the world's greatest multiracial, multi-religious, multicultural constitutional democracy need to know, what are the weaknesses that these reactionary alt-right neo-fascist forces conspire to take advantage of.

"Because they did, and it will be both agonizing and riveting for the country to see how close we came to losing it all. And it's as close to fascism in my lifetime and we need people to understand what the weaknesses were, and how we're going to seal up the weaknesses so we can move forward on the pressing issues of our time, like climate change, which is bearing down on everybody."

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