 Welcome to Talk Story with John Wahee. We are in the middle of a very historic series of interviews. We're going to be talking this morning with Congressman Ed Case. And he is going to tell us a little bit about where he was, what happened during the insurrection and then we'll follow up with impeachment and the aftermath. But I am so glad to get to Congressman on the show knowing how busy you are, particularly at this moment in time up in Washington. So Aloha and Mahalo as they say back home, so to speak. So Congressman. Aloha Governor and to all of your listeners. It's great to join you again. As you can tell I'm on Capitol Hill right now. And yes, it's a very, very busy time. We're trying as hard as we can to get COVID-19 emergency assistance out to the American people. And that's for one right now. That is a priority. And I hope to spend some time talking a little bit about that at the end of the session. But before then, I want to know where were you when the insurrection took place? I mean, what was it like? I was sitting exactly where I'm sitting right now, which is my office, my congressional office on Capitol Hill. We have, of course, the United States Capitol itself and then very, very close to the U.S. Capitol, no more than a few minutes walk. Our three house office buildings, Rayburn, Longworth, and Kennan. And I was in my office in the Rayburn building sitting where I'm sitting right now. And I was watching on the screen behind me the debate over certification of the election results, because of course, let's remember that that was the day that right day under our Constitution and laws for Congress to meet to to certify the results of the election. And we knew already from the from the previous months and days and hours that that was going to be a very, very difficult day contrary to the vast majority of elections throughout our history, where certification has been more pro forma than anything else, because all of the states would have already certified as they did in this situation. But we knew that this was going to be objected to. And so we were all instructed, for the most part, to stay away from the chambers of the U.S. House for COVID-19 purposes. And so we were told, don't go there unless you have to speak. There were a limited number of our colleagues that that were there to speak, or there were a limited number of seats where they could watch the proceedings from from the from the from the balcony of the chamber. But there were no more than about 30 members in the chamber total and the rest of us. This was not this was the precautions that you were taking because of COVID-19. I mean, none of this had anything to do with the rally that Paul or President Trump was holding. Not at all. And in the normal course in a non-COVID-19 environment, I would have been there and I would have wanted to be there for such a critical series of votes. And I would have wanted to be there to participate in the debate personally. But the fact of the matter was most of us were not. So I was sitting in my office, I was watching the debate. And there came a time where the debate was obviously heated. We obviously knew that there were there were many protesters around the Capitol. I had they had been there since the previous night. We had had votes that night and I had walked out from outside from from the US Capitol back to my office and stopped to talk to some of the folks that were starting to gather. So, you know, clearly we knew it was a difficult day to start with. We didn't know that this was going to be the outcome of it. But but for me, personally, I was watching the proceedings that there came a point at which I could tell that something was wrong just because I know what the rhythms of the house are. And I could tell from watching that TV that that something had disrupted the house. At first, I thought it was perhaps some protesters up in the up in the balcony and the visitors gallery, you know, yelling or something like that. Until I realized there were no such people in the gallery. Well, something else was happening. So you became aware of this watching television. When did you really get a sense that the Capitol was under siege? Well, a couple of things happened very, very quickly. First of all, I saw what was happening on TV, and then the feed went blank, which was highly unusual. At that moment, my personal device, because we are all connected to security through through, you know, a very specific personal network to alert us to emergencies and my my my emergency assistance, you know, system went off. And the message was, you know, capital, you know, capital, I forget exactly what it was, but the capital is under assault. Stay in your office, shelter in place, lock your doors, turn off your lights, so that nobody knows that you're in your office and be quiet. Did you have staff in your office with you that morning? I had some members of my staff because my chief of staff was with me here, and I had a couple of brand new members who were appropriately, you know, spaced out for COVID-19 purposes. So we were taking the precautions, but they were here. And they had just started like two to three days before that. What an experience to walk into as a new staffer, you know. I mean, you go there thinking. Well, yes, I mean, and an unfortunate experience, but none, but clearly a very disturbing moment in our history, but they were witness to it, because we did then shelter in place for six hours. And then of course, after I got that alert, I turned on the TV to the regular stations and they showed the capital under siege. So I knew pretty clearly that that was happening, although I did not at the time know the extent of it. And I certainly didn't understand the severity of it in terms of loss of life and serious injury. Now you're in which building at the next to the state capitol? You're in the Rayburn? I mean the Rayburn building. Well, there must have been the Rayburn building. There were so many people involved in that whole incident that they actually, from what little I know about Washington, it would seem that even the Rayburn building must have had people right outside of it. Well, very close by to it. Well, you know, first of all, the focus of the assault was the U.S. capital itself. However, from all reports, some of the folks that assaulted the capitol had quite detailed maps of the capitol to include the underground tunnel that leads from the capitol directly to the Rayburn building. So I can walk from where I'm sitting through a tunnel underground to the floor of the U.S. capitol in about four minutes. And so that means they could have basically run down the same tunnel and arrived at the Rayburn building. And in fact, that the capitol police was rightly concerned that that would be what they would do. It didn't turn out to be what happened. Also we, at the same time, before the actual assault, there were two, as I recall, alerts on my phone of suspicious objects in the grounds around the capitol. So right outside the Rayburn and Cannon and Longworth buildings. And in fact, as it turned out, one of them was a false alarm, but one of them was not a false alarm. It was a pipe bomb that had been left within 75 yards of the entrance to the Cannon building. Now I had nothing like the experience my colleagues did, or that for that matter, thousands of capital police and National Guard troops, et cetera, that were actually defending the capitol. And a number of my colleagues were in the capitol at the time. And the U.S. Senate was in session. They chose to, for the most part, because they can distance a little bit more in their chamber, but they were in personal sessions. So the consequences and risks to those that were in the Senate chamber was far broader than in the House chamber. Nonetheless, to listen to my colleagues talk about their own experiences during the attack was they legitimately felt that they were in danger of up to and including losing their life. And so there's no reason to doubt that it could have happened under different circumstances. Wow, that's what an incredible experience. Now, you know, we move on from that day and it triggers a second impeachment of the former president. And tell us a little what it was like to go through that experience first in formulating the articles of impeachment and watching the trial being presented by your colleagues. Well, the charge, of course, let's remember that in impeachment that the job of the United States House is to charge. The job of the United States House is not to decide but to charge. And so our job was to evaluate the evidence that we had and decide whether to charge other president by passage of articles of impeachment with a crime that justified removal from office or could justify removal from office. And when I use the word crime, one thing that I want to be very clear on is that although there are analogies to an actual criminal offense, as most people understand it, that's not what our job is. Our job is to decide whether the president violated his oath of office in such a way as to justify removal from office. And so that's the context for crime in this situation. And so it was necessary, I believe, for us to enter into the deliberation over whether to actually pass articles of impeachment. The decision that we made very early on, which I thought was the correct decision, was to focus very narrowly on the exact attack on the Capitol and the linkage from that attack to the actions of the president in order to determine whether, in fact, the president, in our view, the president, had incited the violence that then resulted in the attack on the Capitol and had conducted himself in a way as to violate his oath of office. And that was the actual article of impeachment that we evaluated and eventually passed. And I voted for that because I felt that that charge was entirely justified under the facts. You know, as a lawyer, you must have been, at least I was, impressed by the case that the House of Representatives made in the act trial itself. You know, I know that there are different standards for impeachment as they might be in the court of law in the sense that you are looking at things from a different perspective in a way. But I felt that the House managers did a job that in the court of law would have rendered a positive verdict. I mean, are you got any thoughts about the case that was presented to the State Senate? Well, I believe that had the president actually been charged in a court of law with incitement to violence, using the standards that are applied to evaluate whether incitement to violence had actually occurred. And you know this also as a lawyer that you go through a couple of steps. Did the president say something that could incite violence? Was there a connection between the statement that he made and the actual occurrence of what happened? These are the basic elements of incitement to violence in a criminal case in the court of law. And I believe that our charge was appropriate so that if a prosecutor had made the same charge on the same facts, it would have been entirely appropriate. And I believe that a jury having listened to the case on both sides may well have found President Trump guilty of incitement to violence. It was entirely plausible. That was again, was not the standard that we applied because our standard is have you violated your oath of office, which is to protect the Constitution, protect the democratic process, and protect your fellow citizens. And I felt that he violated that basic, fundamental oath of office. But it's analogous again to the criminal prosecution. And I thought, I agree with you. I think the house managers laid out a very deliberate case. I didn't think that the defense was, first of all, I don't buy the defense at all that it's unconstitutional to impeach a former president because otherwise you just give a president carte blanche to do whatever he or she wants in the closing months of a presidency. I don't think that's what the founders anticipated. And then on the facts, I don't think they effectively disputed the connection between what the president did and the assessment of his motives, which is part of this. Did that actually intend that result? And I think we have to conclude that the president at least knew it was a possibility. And even knowing it was a possibility, from my perspective, justified impeachment. Well, we're going to take a short break and then come back to this very interesting conversation. I want to talk to you about a little bit about the Senate's participation in all of this and what happened. But I think right now we're going to take a one minute break and we'll be right back, Congressman. Thank you so much for your insight. Welcome back. We are here talking story with Congressman Ed Case. And he is laying the foundation for our study of American history, frankly, and learning a lot about what happened at the State Capitol during the insurrection and the impeachment. Congressman, you made your case as the House, and that went before the Senate. Do you have any thoughts about the way the Senate conducted its trial? Well, again, I think that the House managers, and these are the representatives of the House in effectively being the prosecutors of the president in the US Senate, which again has the duty to actually hear the charge and decide what to do with it. I think they did a great job of laying out the facts. They did not lay out, I didn't think, a political case. They laid out the facts. They laid out what happened and when and why the charge was justified in terms of causal connection between the actions of the president and the assault on the Capitol, which was what the president did was fairly straightforward and what the crowd did was a very, very straightforward. I got to say this though. It seemed like on one hand things were done very factually, but it was also done in a very political context. I mean, you can't get away from the fact that ultimately the impeachment process is about politics. Well, the impeachment process is the accountability of a president of the United States to his or her fellow citizens through the mechanism under the US Constitution. There is nothing in the US Constitution that limits that inquiry to purely violations of criminal law or for that matter to so-called politics. Yes, there was some element of politics and some legal scholars going back to the founding fathers have always said that impeachment is a political response by which they don't mean politics as we know it, but by which they mean the accountability of a president to Congress and to the American people through Congress. In that sense, there was a broader sense of accountability that was at the heart of the question in the US Senate. The impeachment managers put on their case and the president's defense team put on its case, but I think we can all. I want to thank you for clarifying that because sometimes we use the word politics or political a little too loosely. There were some tones of partisanship, but really it was the impeachment itself is about political accountability as you just so eloquently expressed. Of course, there were political ramifications to the debate that went well beyond the assault on the Capitol. It was not the basis of my decision to impeach him, but I can't speak for all of my colleagues and certainly the broader picture of the Trump presidency was part of that debate in one way shape or form and accountability for it, for that matter. But at the end of the day, as we know, it was not a partisan vote. In fact, it was the least partisan vote ever for any impeachment and it came closer really on a nonpartisan basis to actual conviction than any of the other situations that we've dealt with impeachment. You know, the first impeachment of President Trump with one exception was a purely partisan vote. This one wasn't. You had a number of Republicans who felt that there was a violation of President Trump's oath of office, and so you can't wrap this up and call it, you know, pure part of. Well, I'm glad you're bringing that out because it so underscores the idea of the merits of the underlying case that you would in a divided environment still have people acting in a nonpartisan way on the facts. And so it also underscores in my mind because there's a kind of some of the political fallout has to do with the fact that the former president is going around basically claiming vindication that somehow not reaching two-thirds vote is the vindication of his actions. When, you know, in my opinion, the fact that you had a non-partisan response kind of won the cuts that argue. Anyway, so that happened. Okay, we went through the trial, we went through, what happens now? I mean, is there any fallout for any of this? Oh, yes. I mean, clearly the impeachment, second impeachment, has amplified divisions within the Republican Party itself. And so if I could say, you know, one of the principal areas of fallout is what direction will the Republican Party go now? It has been one of our two major parties for a long, long time. It clearly still has a major role in our country, given a number of factors, the switches in the majorities in the House and the Senate over the last 20 years and in the presidency for that matter. But the Republican Party has kind of a day of reckoning right now, which is, you know, which way are we gonna go? Are we gonna be the party that sanctions the behavior of President Trump and or is unwilling politically? And I make that, I use that word in the political sense of politically, unwilling to depart from him, unwilling to take the risk, unwilling to stand on principle to say that his conduct is not acceptable and there's a different place for our party or is it the other side of the Republican Party, which, whether you agree with it or not, is kind of back to the principles of conservatism under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and really before we got into a Republican Party that started to, you know, divert into, you know, other approaches. And by the way, I'm not accepting my own party because I think my own party has many of the same questions to face, but not in the context of a former leader like Trump, not in the crystallized context of, are you the party of Trump or are you the party of Lincoln? Of the party of Lincoln or of the people, but with a conservative viewpoint? You know, when I was active, they involved with issues and things on the Congress, you know, the leadership of the Senate, for example, was George Mitchell or Bob Dole. And Bob, in my opinion, an outstanding gentleman. I mean, you couldn't, you know, and they ended up both being my law partners at one time. So we used to sit around and talk politics, but there was this feeling that no matter where you are from the center line, that the interest at stake was the country. You know, I don't know whether we have moved on from something like that to something more like what was the interest at stake might be some kind of a cultural divide. I mean, people just don't see the same America anymore. Well, I mean, we have moved on, but the question is whether there's enough of what was, which I thought was far preferable from the perspective of the president future of our country and whether we can get back to that. So is this kind of more of a permanent divide? I don't believe so. I can't believe so. I can't, personally, I can't accept the notion of a permanently divided country. And let me also observe that in, for example, just take Hawaii as an example. And my own district for that matter, one third plus of the voters of Hawaii and of my district voted for President Trump just a few months ago. And I have to represent them as I represent the people that did not vote for President Trump. And so, you know, my responsibility is to my district and to my constituents there. And of course, I have to make my judgments based on my own, you know, perspectives and guidance from my constituents. But that doesn't mean I walk away from one third plus of my own constituents. And I neither can I say that our country and walk away from one half of our fellow citizens because of a disagreement. I can't accept that result. And I would go back also to your question what happens now and observe that we're not to the bottom of what actually happened on January 6th. There are ongoing investigations, including by the FBI on large scale, to determine some of the basic questions that are still outstanding. For example, to what degree was this a coordinated attack and who actually coordinated it. And so, there may well be major developments as we get through that evaluation. You know, I read an article recently that talked about America in general in what the article, the point of the article was saying that we know what evil looks like, Hitler and you know, Stalin and the rest. What we don't know in America right now is what's good. That a lot of our debate on policy centers on people who are culturally divided on the definition of what is good. And do you see any way that that kind of drift can be overcome? Because I agree with you. I think, you know, I long, I remember what it was like to be able to, you know, go across the aisle and talk to an Everett Dirksen or talk to somebody or talk to Bob Know about the country as a Democrat and persuade him to see Hawaii's point of view. And yeah, and I don't know whether that's even possible. Well, I would say this back to you on that. First of all, I think we all know inside ourselves what looks like good. I think we all know and believe that we should try to work together as one country. We may have great disagreements and we may feel very, very divided and polarized, but I think we all understand that at the end of the day we are still all Americans and we owe it to each other to try to work through our differences. So I think that's good. And I think most of us recognize that good. I would also say that you may, you started out by saying we don't, we can see what evil is. And I will tell you that in the course of history, many times people did not see evil as it was approaching them. They only saw it when it was upon them and or when it was too late. You made reference to Germany under Hitler. Germany democratically elected Otto Hitler before he, before, before they saw it through evil. And so, you know, he stormed the capital in Germany and took the problem. Exactly. You know, he burned down the Rex Bank. And so, and so I think that we can never be too vigilant. And I think that although some people discount it, when we, when we just looked the other way, when the citadel of our democracy, the, the, the, the living representation of our democracy is assaulted by fellow citizens with, I believe, the incitement of the president of the United States, that's something that you better pay attention to because from them, from there, it can get a lot worse very, very fast until pretty soon, you know, pretty soon you're into the, the true, true evil phase. Thank you so much for all that, you know, that your participation this morning, but I got a few minutes to start running over, but I do want you to tell the people of Hawaii a little bit about what you're doing in Congress in terms of your committee assignments, how did that all work for Hawaii and the rest of it? If you don't mind. Sure. No, thank you very much. Well, you know, first of all, I just took in early January, my fifth oath of office in, in Congress. And so, I'm starting to, I'm starting to have some mileage up here. And, and I, and I hope that that that seniority is, is being used for the benefit, not only of our country, but especially for Hawaii. So, so the committees that I'm on here are very good committees for Hawaii. So the, the main committee that I'm on here is the Appropriations Committee, which is, which is the oldest committee in the United States Congress, the House Appropriations Committee, and is the committee responsible for allocating and fighting up and sending out federal funding. That's very important, very important committee. Very important committee. I was very, very privileged and lucky to get on it in my last time in Congress. And so I've tried to use that committee to the maximum on behalf of Hawaii to take care of many, many needs. And by the way, it's not all about just money. The Appropriations Committee gives you a great deal of ability to influence the direction of federal departments and, and if Congress itself in areas that help Hawaii in a non-money way. That's number one. Number two, I'm a member again, this time of the committee on natural resources, which has jurisdiction over all of our public lands, including national parks, etc., etc., which is very important in Hawaii. It also has jurisdiction of all of our oceans, which is critical to us. And I take a personal interest in our oceans being from the ocean, if I can put it that way. And then finally, that committee has jurisdiction over native Hawaiians. And so there's a critical nexus to Hawaii through that committee. And so those are my two committees. Of course, I work with my fellow delegation members, Senators Hirano and Shotsen, and now Representative Kaheli, who also have very, very good committees. And so our challenge as a delegation is to exert the positions and influence that we have, which is one of the best collective positions and influences in a generation plus for the Hawaii congressional delegation to the benefit of Hawaii. Well, thank you. And thank you so much for joining us this morning here that, I guess it's early afternoon in Washington. You got any last words for people in Hawaii? When are we going to see some COVID relief or whatever? Well, we're still seeing COVID relief from, especially from the $900 billion bill that we passed in December that's still coming into Hawaii and the billions of dollars. But the one that we're working on right now is the next big one, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan proposed by President Biden. And I'm very much hoping and believing that we will pass that by mid-March and that we will start to see the results pretty much immediately. And as a final closing item, I welcome anybody to contact me or to check me out through case.house.gov. So if you have any comments on this show or anything else, we can help you out with anything. Just contact us at case.house.gov. Mahalo, Congressman. I really appreciate your taking time from your very busy schedule to participate in our show. Thank you. Aloha. Thank you very much for doing this. Aloha.