CNN Anchor Fact Checks Jamie Raskin Over Wild Defense of Dem Colleague’s Texts With Epstein

CNN’s Pamela Brown fact-checked Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) while grilling him over his defense of Rep. Stacey Plaskett’s (D-VI) relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

After playing a clip of Raskin defending Plaskett on the House floor by arguing that she was “merely taking a phone call from her constituent, Jeffrey Epstein,” Brown noted that he didn’t have his facts straight.

“To be clear, she [Plaskett] initiated the text chain [with Epstein] on that day,” observed Brown before asking: “Are Democrats losing the moral high ground on the Epstein issue by defending her as you have?”

“Well, look, we’ve been demanding a complete release of the file, and now they wanted to discipline her, censure her because she’d engaged in that text exchange with a convicted criminal. Of course, our Republican colleagues engage in text exchanges all the time with Donald Trump, who has 34 felony criminal offenses to his name. So I don’t know exactly what she’s being charged with there,” replied Raskin, who continued:

My point was simply she had not violated the Constitution, she had not violated federal law, and she had violate, to my knowledge, any rule of the House of Representatives. So, you know, look, we’re not afraid of anything that’s in the Epstein files, and we want to see justice done for the survivors. That’s what this is about. We want to see the truth come out, and it’s the Republicans who are running around trying to figure out who’s in there and who’s going to be implicated, and that’s not our approach to it.

But Stacey Plaskett obviously didn’t violate any law, or they didn’t even allege that she violated a rule of the House of Representatives. What rule did she violate? People text and email and call us all the time. I mean, do I have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein? No. And you know, it’s unfortunate that he’s got some people’s phone numbers but, you know, he’s no longer with us. The point now is can we do justice for the victims and the survivors of this nightmare because we’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of crimes that were committed, if not thousands of crimes that were committed by a billion-dollar enterprise.

“Yeah, and we’ve had many victims on and we have been very focused on that. Just to be clear, though, use the example of the president, texting with the president of the United States is different than a pedophile, right? I mean, Jeffrey Epstein was more than just a constituent,” shot back Brown, who continued to grill Raskin. “He was a known sex offender.”

Watch the full interview above via CNN.

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