MSNBC "All in with Chris Hayes" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Joaquin Castro

Interview

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HAYES: Joyce Vance and Elizabeth Holtzman, thank you so much. Joining me  now is Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas, a member of the  House Intelligence Committee. And Congressman, as sitting on that  committee which has been doing its own investigations both in the minority  and now in the majority, your reaction to the judge finding that Manafort  did in fact lie particularly about his interactions with Kilimnik.

REP. JOAQUIN CASTRO (D), TEXAS: You know, the fact that he lied is not a  surprise. But to me this is much more serious than even the lying to  Congress or lying to the FBI. Because remember, this like aim when he had  already made struck a plea agreement. So all he had to do was meet certain  conditions and they were going to ask that his sentence probably be reduced  somehow or his cooperation be taken into consideration.
But there was something that was so important and valuable to Paul Manafort  in lying that he went ahead and did it. And so as a member of the  Intelligence Committee, I would like for us to find out what that was.

HAYES: Did you -- to speak to the thoroughness of the House Intelligence  Committee`s Investigation under the stewardship of the Republican majority,  how close did you guys come to uncovering just some of the information that  we`re learning here?

CASTRO: Not very close at all. You know, the tragedy of the last two  years of this investigation under Devin Nunes is there wasn`t a single  subpoena that was issued for phone records or bank records, travel records,  anything that would verify or discount what was told us by the witnesses.  So we`ve still got a lot of work to do when it comes to putting all these  pieces together.

HAYES: As someone who`s on the Intelligence Committee and this all started  as essentially a counterintelligence probe, we kind of know that there were  red flags going up and people concerned that essentially Russian  intelligence was trying to co-opt or compromise members of the Trump  campaign.

What do you make of these sort of three -- there`s now three different  instances in which Russian associates or people linked to Russian  government or intelligence are approaching the Trump campaign with a plan  to lift sanctions. The Russian adoption meeting in Trump Tower which is of  course about lifting sanctions. Those sanctions would have led to the end  of Russian adoptions. This with Konstantin Kilimnik around a peace plan  for Ukraine and the peace plan that was floated to Michael Cohen and  delivered into the president`s White House we think perhaps to Michael  Flynn. What does that say to you?

CASTRO: Well, you`re right and you asked a great question. And I think  for most of the American public what we saw was the interference in terms  of Facebook ads and so forth with the 2016 election and that`s what we  think about as a Russian operation to affect or interfere with our  elections and that was a full-court press.

But what we also see was that there was a full-court press of human  intelligent agents or people with connections to the Russian intelligence  agencies who were obviously targeting the Trump campaign to get something  out of them. It looks like one of the things they were trying to get out  of them was a relief from sanctions. And you know what we need to figure out is just how successful they`ve been and how much the Trump campaign and Trump associates have cooperated with them.

HAYES: All right, Congressman Joaquin Castro on the House Intelligence  Committee, thank you very much.

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