Monday on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) dismissed Delegate Stacey Plaskett’s (D-VI) text message exchange with Jeffrey Epstein during a House hearing because he said Republican lawmakers text with President Donald Trump.
Co-host Pamela Brown said, “I want to ask you about Democratic Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett last week, as you know, there was a failed censure effort over her texts with Epstein during an oversight hearing in 2019. He was a known sex offender. She acknowledged Epstein’s influence in her line of questioning during that hearing on this show when we had her on, but would not say it was an error in judgment. Here’s how you defended her on the House floor last week. So our viewers can listen.”
Last Tuesday on the House floor, Raskin said, “However ill advised it may have been she took a phone call from one of her constituents. They’ve arranged a Democratic member for taking a phone call from her constituent Jeffrey Epstein, in the middle of a hearing. And of course, I don’t think there’s any rule here against taking phone calls in a hearing.”
Brown said, “And to be clear, she initiated the text chain on that day but are Democrats losing the moral high ground on the Epstein issue by defending her, as you have?”
Raskin said, “Well, look, we’ve been demanding a complete release of the file and now they wanted to discipline her, censure her because she did engage 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. My point was simply, she had not violated the Constitution, she had not violated federal law, and she not violated, to my knowledge, any rule of the House of Representatives.”
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