Two weeks after President-elect Donald Trump suggested Jan. 6 Committee members “should go to jail” for erasing evidence and testimonies gathered from their investigation into the Capitol riot, and lying about it, Raskin expressed doubt that Republicans have enough evidence to prosecute the alleged crimes in an interview with Hugo Lowell on the Highly Conflicted podcast.

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Raskin, who was recently elected as the top Democrat in the House Judiciary Committee, said he will “resist any efforts to politicize the Department of Justice to target the President’s enemies or protect his friends.”

He cited the Speech and Debate Clause in Article 1 of the constitution as a protection for Liz Cheney, a former congresswoman and member of the Jan. 6 Committee. Republicans have condemned Cheney for alleged witness tampering and encouraging a witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, to commit perjury.

“Witness tampering and perjury are about trying to get people to lie. Encouraging truthfulness is not a crime,” Raskin said. “It is not against the law to encourage someone to testify truthfully in a legal proceeding.”

He also noted that Republicans “haven’t contradicted a single thing that Cassidy Hutchinson said or any of the factual statements in the [Jan. 6] Committee’s report.”

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In the Dec. 17 “Interim Report on the Failures and Politicization of the January 6th Select Committee,” some findings include that Hutchinson allegedly “falsely claimed to have drafted a handwritten note for President Trump on January 6,” that she “lied about the classification status of documents to disparage Mark Meadows,” and that she “misrepresented President Trump’s actions at Lafayette Square Park in the summer of 2020.”

The report claims there is more than a terabyte of “missing digital data” as well as “missing video recordings of witness interviews,” and highlights multiple cases of alleged “collusion” in the investigation, including between “Special Counsel Jack Smith and President Trump’s adversaries.”

Raskin said that the Speech and Debate Clause “protects legislators in their legislative capacities, both in direct legislative action and investigative research,” and “if the executive branch can intimidate legislators to stop them from investigating, you’re shutting down a central aspect of legislative functioning.”

The Jan. 6 Committee concluded that Trump was a “central cause” of the Capitol riot. However, Trump has pointed out that prior to things getting out of hand, he told demonstrators to “peacefully and patriotically” protest, and that he requested thousands of troops to the Capitol that were allegedly denied by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

While Trump said he thinks those behind the Jan. 6 Committee should go to jail, he said he will not direct his FBI Director or Attorney General to “send them to jail.”

“No, not at all. I think that they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to,” he said in an NBC interview with Kristen Welker. “They can do whatever they want.”