MSNBC "All in with Chris Hayes" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Jim Himes

Interview

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HAYES: Today, National Security Advisor John Bolton took an interesting  approach to Russian interference in the presidential election. While in Moscow to discuss U.S.  withdrawal from nuclear weapons treaty he told a Russian radio station,  quote, "the point I made to Russian colleagues today was that I didn`t  think whatever they had done in terms of meddling in the 2016 election,  that they had any effect on it, but what they have had an effect on the  U.S. is to sow enormous distrust of Russia," that is according to text from  the interview provided by the National Security Council.

Bolton, and other Trump administration officials, may get their chance to  share views on the records if the Democrats were to win back control of the  House and reopen the Russia investigation.

Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut is a member of the House Intelligence  Committee and he joins me now.

There has been some movement to suggest that`s in the offing were you to  take back the gavel on the Democratic side. Is that true?

REP. JIM HIMES, (D) CONNECTICUT: Well, Chris, there is certainly ample  information that we would want to get.

So, interview after interview where one of two Republicans would say, hey,  did you conspire, collude or cooperate? And the witness would invariably  say, no, and the Republican colleague would say, oh, that`s good. And we`d  move on. No attempt to follow-up. No attempt to, you know, look at phone  calls that we would have liked to have known were made.

And certainly -- and Chris, this doesn`t get a lot of coverage, but  incredibly broad assertions of executive privilege including for the period of the transition, including  for conversation that`s didn`t happen anywhere near the president. So there`s ample questions that we  have.

But here`s the thing, we`ve got a Mueller investigation underway.  Presumably he is going to cover a lot of the questions that we were looking  at. So before we know exactly how big we would want to be, we would want  to hear from Bob Mueller and find out what he determined and look to see if  there were any holes we could fill.

HAYES: All right, since you`re on the House intelligence committee I  wanted to ask you also about some developments in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi in the consulate  in Istanbul. Gina Haspel, who is the Director of the Central Intelligence  Agency, has been dispatched to Turkey. Do you understand the nature of  that mission? What is your sense of what the U.S. is doing now?

HIMES: Well, what I`m going to tell you is a little speculative. But my  guess is very senior people in Washington -- the secretary of state, the  secretary of treasury, the president, head of the CIA -- don`t want to be caught under this rolling disaster of changing  stories that is coming out of Saudi Arabia.

The president of the United States, of course, has been all over the map on  this issue, which is not a good look for the United States when a journalist has been killed. And so my guess is that Gina Haspel, who is very serious business, is going to look at whatever evidence the Turks have, listen to tapes, look at videos, whatever there is, and come back with an assessment.

And while I don`t trust the president to get consistent on this, or if it  turns out that the worst is true and the crown prince ordered this, to be  particularly aggressive in his response, I do trust our intelligence  community to come back and tell us what happened.

HAYES: Yeah. I wonder, there is an oversight question here as well, not  just obviously on Russia, but on Saudi Arabia. And this bit of reporting  today caught my eye, which is that a pro-government Turkish newspaper,  which of course has been doing all the leaking of what appears to be  Turkish intelligence, said that four calls went to the head of Prince  Mohammed`s office, and another call -- this is in the midst of the killing -- went to the United States.  Seems relevant to me to find out what is going on there if that`s true.

HIMES: Yeah, it sure does. And, you know, Chris, I`m again speculating a  little bit here because none of us are in Washington being briefed at this  point in time. But, you know, our -- I am pretty sure that our  intelligence apparatus already has a pretty good sense of exactly who  called whom, maybe even the substance of those calls, any emails, any texts  that went back and forth.

You buy a lot of capability with what we spend on our intelligence  community. And I`ve been sort of been a little bemused as I`ve heard the  president continually say we don`t really know. We don`t really know. We  don`t really know. I`m not sure that`s true. I`m pretty sure we know  things that the Saudis don`t know we know.

HAYES: Should there be a fundamental reassessment of the relationship  given what we have learned?

HIMES: Oh, you know, yes. There should have been a fundamental  reassessment when the crown prince kidnapped the Lebanese prime minister, when he started a  war in Yemen using our weaponry and bomb school buses, you know, when he  decided to brutalize Canada over a tweet.

I must say I was hoping that the crown prince would be a reformer. And  none of us knew. But he is taking actions with our taxpayer funded  military, with our weaponry, that would just appall Americans. So, yes,  even apart, even before Khashoggi there was a dire need for a reassessment  of that relationship.

And, of course, the president got charmed, he got charmed because they  treated him with a lot of respect in Riyadh. And that`s going to be a  pretty tough thing to overcome, I think.

HAYES: Final question, a sort of factual one. Does anyone in your orbit  on the House Intelligence Committee, the Democratic side, do you have any  way of knowing what Bob Mueller is up to and when he is up to it?

HIMES: Well, you know, I`ll offer a real tribute to Bob Mueller. The  answer to that question is an unequivocal no. You might imagine that Mueller, given the stakes and given the performance of the House Intelligence Committee under Chairman Devin Nunes, would treat us like we had small poxand, in fact, I think for that reason -- and also because it would be inappropriate in an independent apolitical investigation to have 
communication with a political body.

We don`t know much.

Look, in the early parts of this investigation that we did, we set up a  mechanism to make sure that we didn`t do an interview that would screw up his legal process.

HAYES: Right.

HIMES: But beyond that, no, we`ve gotten nothing.

HAYES: Congressman Jim Himes, thank you for making time.

HIMES: Thank you, Chris.

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