MSNBC "All in with Chris Hayes" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Adam Schiff

Interview

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HAYES: Standing in the way of hundreds of thousands of Americans getting  paid and getting back to work is one man really, the President of United  States who appeared briefly today to congratulate Pelosi and insist on  funding for the border wall that Mexico was supposed to pay for. It was  bills depressing briefing but the Trump -- the president refused to take a  single question from reporters.

Now, the stark difference in the current makeup of the two parties, their  coalition`s and their politicians has never been more clear. The GOP  represented by a sea of white male faces both at the White House and the  House of Representatives were only 13 Republicans are women and just nine  are not white. The House Democratic caucus, by contrast, is historic. 89  women, 96 people of color, and led by the woman who became the first female  Speaker of the House in 2007 and who was now returned to that position 12  years later.
For Donald Trump, this is a nightmare scenario. House Democrats now has  subpoena power which means they could compel testimony and make people turn  over documents that Trump and his allies would very much like to keep  hidden. Investigations will come from a variety of committees. I`m joined  now by the man who`ll chair one of the most important of them, Adam Schiff,  Democratic California, the new Chair of the House Intelligence Committee.  How are you feeling today?

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D), CALIFORNIA: Good, good. It`s a new day.

HAYES: You now chair this committee which was the subject of tremendous  scrutiny and controversy in the last Congress under the chairmanship of  Devin Nunez. The first question I guess is they -- there was a formal  inquiry that that committee convened and released a report by the majority  saying there was no collusion, nothing really to see here. What do you do  now? Do you restart the inquiry?

SCHIFF: Well, for us the inquiry never ended. The Republicans walked away  from. It as you say, they issued a report which was a political document  saying nothing to see here. We believe everybody who came in and  everything they had to say including Michael Cohen and everybody else. We  always thought that it was perilous to just suggest that we don`t have to  compel answers to questions we don`t have to do, any follow up to get  documents and materials to determine whether people were telling the truth  or not, phone records, the kind of things that are a staple of real  investigations. We now see what a folly that was.

But we for our part, when the Republicans walked away and decided they were  going to devote their entire time to investigating the investigators, kept  our work going in. So we kept bringing witnesses in. It was hard because  we couldn`t compel them. So we`re going to continue that work. We will  invite the Republicans to rejoin the investigation if they`re interested,  if they`re willing. We`d like to work in the bipartisan fashion which we  committed doing at the outset but it will be up to them whether they`re  interested.

HAYES: Are there glaring holes, glaring things that are the obvious first  priorities in terms of getting your hands on in terms of subpoenas or  requests?

SCHIFF: There are. And you know, I`ve held up this example before because  it`s such a graphic illustration of the kind of investigations the  Republican we`re leading and where they fell short. We know in the run-up  to this meeting at Trump Tower that there were phone calls going back and  forth between Trump Jr. and the Russian oligarch`s son Emin Agalarov where  Don Jr. was trying to find out are the Russian serious, and what do they  have to offer, and should I take this meeting, should I bring my brother- in-law, should I bring the campaign chairman. This is the most important  time. They haven`t even summon up the nomination yet.

And sandwich between those calls back and forth between Don Jr. and Emin  Agalarov is a blocked call. And we wanted to know, did that come from the  President. Was the president involved in the planning or the approval this  meeting? So we said let`s subpoena the phone records to find out and the  Republican answer was no, we don`t want to know.

HAYES: So can you just do that tomorrow?

SCHIFF: We -- well, we can`t actually do it tomorrow because we --

HAYES: You don`t have the committee yet.

SCHIFF: We don`t have the committee constituted yet. But when we are  constituted, we can get those phone records. And you know, we`re going to  continue to for our part seek voluntary compliance and only use the  subpoenas last resort, but we do anticipate that it will be a necessary  resort in some cases.

HAYES: What about witnesses that have come before your committee and told  you things that you now suspect you`re false?

SCHIFF: Well, probably our first step will be to provide the transcripts  to Bob Mueller so that he can have the benefit of the evidence they contain  but also determine and take appropriate action where people came before a  committee and lie and hold him accountable as indeed Michael Cohen was held  accountable. So that`s an early and I think important step.

HAYES: You -- I want to take a step back for a second because I think that  people who have sort of come to follow your committee closely in this era  have a view of it that`s very different than what its reputation had been.  But I was covering Congress being an office right over there. You know,  the Intelligence Committee is one of these like glad handy, very bipartisan  committees.

You guys sort of stood kind of four square largely because there was a real  kind of back-and-forth with the intelligence community. It`s all very  secret and cloak-and-dagger. You`re in this very elite group of people  that gets information. I mean how much is the committee been broken, its  culture, its sort of institutional basis by the last two years?

SCHIFF: I tell you the good news or the bad news. The bad news has been  pretty obvious. We operated in a bipartisan fashion up until March 20th.  That was the day in 2017 when James Comey testified publicly before our  committee that there were actually two investigations, not just a Clinton  investigation, but have been one of the Trump Organization.

That prompted the now infamous midnight run by our Chairman the following  day or even. That completely blew up bipartisan work on the Russia  investigation. You can`t conduct a legitimate investigation if you`re 
basically in cahoots with someone who may be implicated in that investigation.

The good news is that notwithstanding all of that dysfunction on the Russia  investigation, we continue to do the work that you were familiar with about  our committee before which was the day job, the bread-and-butter, the  oversight of these mammoth agencies making sure they`re funded  appropriately and doing the work they should and maintaining people`s  privacy --

HAYES: And operating legally.

SCHIFF: And operating constitutionally and legally, and all of that we  have continued to do in a non-partisan way. Now you don`t see that --

HAYES: So you`re able to -- I mean, I guess the point there is what from a  sort of almost emotional human level but he institutionally you`re able to  sort of like cordon those things off of each other.

SCHIFF: We have and you know, Mr. Nunez and I, I think made the decision  without ever the need to discuss it. We were not going to let our  differences on the Russian investigation impede the otherwise vital work of  the committee.

HAYES: So here -- then there`s a broader question. It`s a question I want  to ask all Democratic leadership. We`re living right now through this era  of kind of both polarization, institutional norms unwinding, and I think  maximalism increasingly be employed tactically legislatively, OK.

One of the big victories of the Republican Congress, when they got the  majority 2010, was they used the debt ceiling default as a kind of threat  to get an austerity legislation passed. It worked. It was incredibly  reckless. It was unprecedented nearly. What is your personal theory of  your wielding of power and you are respect from norms balanced against  imperatives to deal with what you`re dealing with?

SCHIFF: Well, I think we need to get back to operating rationally and  civilly. We have to stop holding the government and all of its employees  and contractors hostage when you can`t get the votes for your priority  whether it`s a wall or anything else. So we need to get back to some  rational order. We don`t want to repeat the mistakes the excesses, the  overzealous partisanship of the Republicans.

HAYES: I hear that all the time. But what if that`s the way the world  works now? What if you cannot unilaterally put Humpty Dumpty back  together?

SCHIFF: You know, I don`t accept that and I can`t accept it. I think you  know, we fight hard and we fight tough and smart for our priorities but we  also recognize there`s something bigger than us. That we`re going to come  and go in this beautiful building behind us and we have an obligation to  the entire country and to its institutions. Right now, this is the most  precarious time in my lifetime in terms of our republic.

Now we have a president who denigrates the freedom of the press, who goes  after the independence of the judiciary, and in so many ways I think is  threatening the livelihood of our democracy. The answer to that cannot be  more of the same. That just drags us all down.

HAYES: Congressman Adam Schiff, the new chair of the House Intelligence  Committee. Thank you so much for making time on this.

SCHIFF: Thank you.

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