CNN "The Lead with Jake Tapper" - Transcript: Russian Investigation

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

The ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Adam Schiff of California, joins me now.

Congressman, thanks for joining me.

The president's lead attorney in the Russia investigation, Russia probe, John Dowd, resigned today. He'd been urging the president, according to reports, to take a more cooperative approach and work with Bob Mueller and a source familiar with the matter told CNN the president has begun to really doubt that strategy.

What do you think of the shakeup of the legal team, not just Dowd leaving, but diGenova who is accusing the Justice Department and the FBI of conspiracy against the president coming on board?

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA), RANKING MEMBER, INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: Well, it's telling that when the moderate lawyer, the guy that's urging that they work with Bob Mueller is also the guy that just a week ago was saying that Sessions ought to basically fire Mueller, when he's considered the reasonable one just where the Trump team is headed, but bringing on this conspiracy theorist Joe diGenova who will just stoke the unreality of the White House that there's a secret cabal at the FBI, they're all conspiring to frame the president, you know, it's a destructive about for the country to bring on another voice like that, another person who apparently was auditioning on Fox News, brought in at the administration, I think it puts Mueller's investigation at even greater risk.

The fact that we see this escalation of Twitter attacks by the president, Mueller, bringing in lawyers, getting rid of lawyers that said, work with the special prosecutor, any Republican member or Democratic member that will later claim that if we're in a crisis that they didn't see it coming isn't being candid. The Republican members, in particular, need to speak out now, a few have, but even more important, they need to act now, and put their names on a bill and urge the passage of a bill that protects the Mueller investigation, otherwise if the crisis comes and looks more and more like it will, with this change in strategy and this new aggressiveness by the president, they will have to bear a significant part of responsibility that when they had a chance to push back and prevent the crisis, they didn't act.

TAPPER: Well, both Democrats and Republicans could have forced the manner by putting something into the omnibus spending bill, right? I mean, why didn't that happen?

[16:20:01] SCHIFF: Well, Democrats sought to. Republicans resisted it. They viewed it as basically an affront to the president, and they weren't willing to do it. They were more willing to risk a constitutional crisis than include this, so I think that's a terrible mistake, but they control both House and Senate at the moment, and at the moment, their priority seems to be protecting the president, not confronting him.

TAPPER: I want to ask you, you're the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. The Republicans on the committee put out a statement in a report, basically saying that they found no evidence of collusion between the Trump team and the Russian government. Have Democrats found any evidence of collusion?

SCHIFF: Yes, we have, and, you know, when you can see the flaws in the report and you'll see them more graphically when it's released, but just look at one piece of it. George Papadopoulos, this is someone the Russians approach in April 2016. They say they have stolen Clinton e-mails. They preview the dissemination. They want a relationship with the campaign.

Who does Papadopoulos share this with in the campaign? We don't know because they wouldn't bring Papadopoulos in, and them once the special prosecutor was involved with Papadopoulos, that made it more difficult. But we made a motion today to say, let's reach out to the special counsel, let's find out when we can bring Papadopoulos, he's under cooperation agreement with the counsel that should extend to us as well.

They voted us down. They are not interested in finding out who or who Don Jr. talked to about the meeting at Trump Tower. There's phone records that bear on whether the son talked to father, witnesses that came in and refused to tell us about the creation of the false statement that the president reportedly was involved in making about that meeting, they wouldn't insist on hearing from.

So, there is evidence of collusion. There's very well may be more evidence of collusion if the Republicans had been willing to try to find it, but their goal was different. Their goal was protect the president and that's where we are.

TAPPER: I want to turn to the scandal involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. The data of 50 million Americans on Facebook was mined during the presidential election by Cambridge Analytica, a data firm working for then-candidate Donald Trump. Last night on CNN, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he was happy to testify in Capitol Hill if it's the right thing to do.

Do you think he needs to personally testify?

SCHIFF: I do. And this was another motion we made in our committee today to invite him to come testify, but our motion was defeated.

This is serious business. The personal data of tens of millions of American may have been misused, misappropriated, used to target them without their knowledge, and Facebook had embeds, their own people working in Cambridge Analytica with the Trump campaign. Were these embeds aware that this data had been used or made -- still have been used in the campaign or was used to create lookalikes for targeting other American voters?

So, yes, he should come in and testify not only to our committee about the Russia, misuse of their platform, but I think answer questions for other committees about the privacy of American's data, and, perhaps, most significant, as far as I'm concerned, is the impact that the algorithms that Facebook uses maybe having the effect of dividing us, balkanizing, causing us to live in information bubbles where we only hear the information their algorithms tell them we want to hear.

TAPPER: So, the Cambridge Analytica whistle blower who brought this whole story, Christopher Wylie, said that he was concerned that Cambridge Analytica made Russia aware of some of the programs that they were working on, and that that might have sparked the idea that eventually led to some of the disinformation programs and some of the interference that we've seen from Russia in the American elections.

Should Cambridge Analytica also be forced to testify in an open hearing about what exactly they shared with anyone other than the Trump campaign if they did so.

SCHIFF: I think they should. We had also made a motion today to bring Alexander Nix back before our committee. The GOP voted that down. I'm happy to say that Christopher Wylie, the whistle-blower, has accepted our invitation --

TAPPER: Just the Democrats though?

SCHIFF: Just the Democrats. And we invite the Republicans to participate. We would hope they would be interested, but we're going to continue to pursue this and try to find out when was this contractual relationship made with this researcher with links to St. Petersburg University, what about the relationship between Cambridge Analytica and Lukoil, why was a Russian oil company interested in the American voter data and voting patterns?

These are important questions that we hope to get answers to.

TAPPER: Congressman Adam Schiff, always good to see you. Thanks for being here. Really appreciate it.

SCHIFF: Thank you.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source