House Judiciary chairman accuses Trump defense lawyer of manslaughter during cable news interview

The New York congressman who represented the World Trade Center when it was attacked in 2001 slammed former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for manslaughter during a Monday interview on MSNBC.

"The Last Word" anchor Lawrence O'Donnell interviewed Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who currently chairs the House Judiciary Committee. Nadler is also leading the impeachment investigation in Trump, who is being represented by Giuliani.

"I thought what the federal government did in the aftermath of the 9/11 disaster was shameful. I fault no one for working on the pile without proper respiratory equipment the first three days, when he may have been saving people and there might have been people still buried there, but after three days, it was a cleanup, not a rescue operation," he noted. "And you had the head of the EPA and the mayor of the city of New York, for that matter, assuring everybody that the air safe to breathe."

"I was telling people, don’t send your kids back to school, don’t go to work there, don’t work on the pile," Nadler explained.

"What made you think that at that point?" O'Donnell asked.

"You smelt it, obviously, but you saw the dust over everything. You knew there had to be asbestos, fine bits of concrete," he recalled. "The first two days they were saying the air was safe to breathe, we really didn’t have scientific data, we just had suspicions. After that we knew they were lying, we had the scientific data, we had environmentalist groups telling us."

"I get so upset. It was not only unjustified, it was manslaughter. It was manslaughter on the part of the federal government and the mayor of the city at that point to allow people — or to tell people -- it was safe, when we knew it wasn’t safe," Nadler charged.

"And people are dying and will continue to die because of that today," he added.

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