CNN "The Situation Room" - Transcript: Interview With Virginia Congressman Don Beyer

Interview

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ACOSTA: OK, Drew Griffin keeping track of it all for us, thank you very much.

We will turn to Congressman Don Beyer. He has been on the case of Scott Pruitt for many months now.

Congressmen, you have been one of the loudest voices calling for Scott Pruitt's resignation through all of these investigations.

Have you seen someone in Washington cling to their job for so long with so much baggage?

REP. DON BEYER (D), VIRGINIA: It is just unbelievable.

In any other administration, Democrat or Republican, he'd been gone months and months ago. Trump says today that he didn't fire him. But a good boss would have fired him a long, long time ago.

He was megalomaniacal, unethical to the nth degree. You saw the big list up on the screen. One of the things I just read about in the last two days was that job he was going to get for his wife. He said he was going to set up -- told the staff is going to set up a secret LLC, so that it wouldn't have to be disclosed on the federal forms.

This is -- everything he did seem to reek of hiding from the public what he was doing.

ACOSTA: And so you felt it was intentional, every time one of these ethical lapses that would come up, that he was intentionally doing these things? It wasn't one of those things where he didn't know the rules or restrictions?

BEYER: This guy was the attorney general of Oklahoma. I think he was president of the National Association of Attorneys General, a lawyer in the General Assembly. He'd had lots and lots of ethics stuff.

ACOSTA: And, Congressman, we have his resignation letter right here.

In the resignation letter, he takes no personal responsibility, does not apologize for his behavior. What do you make of that?

BEYER: That it's part of the megalomania.

He seems not to understand that he has to live by the same rules that everyone else does, which, by the way, reminds me of the president, who doesn't seem like he has to live by the same rules that we all do.

And the sense that he is way more important than he really is, the notion that he should be the attorney general, for example, of the United States.

And Trump really -- the responsible thing would have -- done to get him out of that seat a lot earlier. By the way, the biggest objection are not this long list of ethical things he's done, the 13 investigations, hopefully the 14th one, but rather what he's done to the environment.

He's basically turned over our clean water rules, our clean air rules, a lot of the chemicals we monitor to the companies were actually being regulated, letting them decide.

ACOSTA: And the president, just talking to reporters on Air Force One, described Pruitt as outstanding and terrific. What does that say to you?

BEYER: That the president just doesn't get it at all, that, first of all, he's not famous for paying attention to what's going on at all.

But here you have the economy that, through the eight years of Obama and now the first year-and-a-half of Trump, is going very, very strong. No one can say that our environmental rules have held back our economic growth.

ACOSTA: And what do you make of some of this talk in Scott Pruitt's resignation letter where he talks about the president coming into office because of God's providence and so on? What is that all about?

[18:10:05]

You have looked at Scott Pruitt closely. What is with that religiosity that is woven into that resignation letter?

BEYER: I don't want to make any broad conclusions, except that it's always weird when you have someone who is so unethical, blends in all the God stuff, and is...

ACOSTA: Does it sound like he worships the president a little bit?

BEYER: Well, maybe.

But he seems not to live up to the kind of code that anybody from a -- the Jewish, Christian, Muslim faith would go to. It's a huge cognitive clash. It's -- I don't want to say his faith isn't real, but he's certainly not living up to the faith that he says he has.

ACOSTA: And let me ask you about immigration, because the number of children in HHS custody apparently is higher than previously said.

HHS said earlier today it's less than 3,000, about 1,000 more kid than what we were previously told. Do you get the sense that they have any kind of grasp on any hard numbers here or know how to get these kids back to their parents? Are they just sort of fumbling around here?

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BEYER: The last two weeks, I visited parents in Baltimore, children out in Prince William County, Virginia, and visited a court.

And there's this tremendous sense that there's no coordination at all. And we go back to Scott Pruitt and unethical. You even want to know when Secretary Nielsen will stop lying about the separation policy that the administration has.

And this is -- I was trying to tell my grandchildren, age 7 and 4, about the kids the other day. And they just could not understand it at all.

ACOSTA: Little kids ask about this, yes.

BEYER: Little kids, they were...

ACOSTA: They see it on the news, and they want to ask people about it.

BEYER: My wife got mad at me for exposing the children to this idea of wrenching children from their parents. I said, well, this is the America that we live in. They need to understand it.

ACOSTA: And what is your sense -- we saw some video in our last hour of a child being reunited with her mother at Boston's Logan Airport.

And just heart-wrenching to watch these reunification. It's good that they're being reunited with their parents, but it sounds as though these families have been psychologically traumatized in all of this.

What is the government's responsibility to those families in the long run? Here's some of that video again of this child being reunited with her mother.

Does the government have a responsibility here to these families that just have been traumatized in all this?

BEYER: I think the first responsibility we have is to understand that the initial anxiety that every one of us faces is separation anxiety from our parents.

And they just made it traumatic for each of these kids. And our next responsibility to do our best to bring them back together as soon as we can.

ACOSTA: And, apparently, this person was not reunited because of this policy, but it just goes to show you what they have been going through.

And then you saw the president earlier today contradicting himself again, saying that the Congress must pass immigration reform.

I'm sure you saw over the weekend where he said, forget about it, which was contrary to what he had said earlier in the week, when he said, let's do it.

What are members of Congress to take from this red-light/green-light game that the president is playing with Congress on immigration?

BEYER: Well, I think we see, as long as Stephen Miller is driving immigration policy in the White House, we're not going to make any progress.

I think, sooner or later, the Republicans in the House and Senate need to ignore Trump, work with Democrats and pass good bipartisan legislation. It's been offered a number of times in both houses. And the House version, it's the Hurd-Aguilar, Democrats, Republicans, it could easily pass.

They won't put it on the floor because Trump says he won't sign it.

ACOSTA: All right, Congressman Don Beyer, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

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