MSNBC "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Adam Shiff

Interview

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O`DONNELL:  Joining us now, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff.  He`s the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
 
Congressman Schiff, I want to get your reaction to what the president had to say today, and what you just heard Chuck Schumer say, which is we`re here because the president promised Mexico would pay for this wall but now he wants American taxpayers to pay.
 
REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA), CHAIRMAN, INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE:  Well, my predominant reaction watching it was sad to see the office of the presidency brought so low.  When you think about other people who have occupied that office and the addresses they have given to rally the country together, to rise in the face of some national challenge, then to watch that display was just painful.
 
And Chuck Schumer is exactly right.  The reason we are where we are tonight is the president promised his supporters over and over and over again that Mexico was going to build this big, beautiful wall.  And that was a fraudulent promise, but nonetheless, he made it.  Kept repeating it.
 
Now he can`t deliver it and he`s asking the taxpayers to pay for it.  Well, they don`t want to pay for it.  Congress doesn`t want to approve it.  The American people don`t support it.  And so we have this rather pathetic display tonight.
 
We need to re-open the government.  We can continue this debate over the president`s wall.  But not do it at a time where he`s effectively holding the American people, federal employees, those who do business with the government, those who need government services, hostage to this broken commitment.
 
O`DONNELL:  As I revealed earlier, the beginning of this program, the president also used tonight as a fundraising event for his re-election campaign.  And in the e-mail that he sent to his supporters, telling them it was a 9:00 p.m. deadline for their contributions, he lied to them very clearly fraudulently represented the contributions as being money that they would contribute to him to secure the border.
 
Then this being Donald Trump after the speech, he sent out another e-mail to supporters who had not yet contributed by the 9:00 p.m. deadline and extended the deadline for them to contribute.  And so it seems, structurally, and including the content of the speech tonight, this was from beginning to end a Trump campaign event including a public fundraiser.
 
SCHIFF:  Well, that may very well be.  And perhaps next time it will have operators standing by, and a phone number across the bottom of your screen.  But, look, this is how the president operates.
 
It`s all about him.  It`s all about now his re-election, re-election, and the suffering that he`s imposing on hundreds of thousands of people who aren`t going to get their paychecks, who can`t pay their bills.  Well, that`s just too bad.
 
And, you know, we are going to be sending bill after bill to the Senate, Senate-passed bills to re-open the government.  I think the pressure to do so is going to become overwhelming on the Republicans.  And as you say, we`re seeing defection after defection now.  It`s my hope that we can break this impasse soon.
 
O`DONNELL:  Congressman, I want to get your reaction to the developments in the Paul Manafort case today.  Discovered that the special prosecutor has found that Paul Manafort was in contact with Russians, sharing polling information and other Trump campaign information with Russians.
 
It raises the question, was that information that Paul Manafort, that polling information, that Paul Manafort was supplying to the Russians, did the Russian hackers then who were operating in the United States, did they then use that to try -- use that polling information to try to influence the vote in the ways that could turn the electoral college in Donald Trump`s favor?
 
SCHIFF:  Well, that`s a profound question.  And at this point, we simply don`t know the answer.  What did a Russian-affiliated intelligence person, at least in the view of the special counsel, want with Trump polling data?
 
And one explanation may be, look, they`re in the midst of a social media campaign to help Donald Trump win the presidency.  And it`s useful to have some of the campaign`s information on their polling numbers and where they`re polling well and who they`re polling well among and who they need to make up ground.
 
It also could be something very different.  It could be an effort by the Trump campaign to show that the president or the candidate then was doing better than the other polls suggested.  We just don`t know, but we certainly need to find out.   It goes, I think, to the very issue of whether and to what degree and how Trump campaign personnel may have been either colluding or conspiring with the Russians.
 
O`DONNELL:  And what do you see today in the indictment of Natalia Veselnitskaya that happened today and this was outside of the special prosecutor`s jurisdiction?  This was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan bringing this indictment.
 
She was the woman who helped arrange that meeting and attended that meeting at Trump Tower in which she was promising basically dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.  She`s indicted in an unrelated case to the campaign.  A case that pre-existed the campaign.  But could there be some linkage here?
 
SCHIFF:  Well, one thing that it certainly shows, Lawrence, that is relevant to the Trump Tower meeting and the issues at the heart of the Mueller investigation, and our own work in the Intelligence Committee, is that this claim that she had made that she`s not a government attorney, she has really little or no affiliation with the Russian government, is bogus.
 
The reason that she was indicted for obstruction of justice in that Prevezon case is that she put forward a pleading that she said essentially that she had no part in producing, a statement of the Russian government absolving the Russians of complicity in this money laundering scheme when we would later find out that, in fact, she wrote this in combination, working in coordination with the Russian government and the Russian general prosecutor.
 
So it certainly now is a consistent portrait we`re getting of Veselnitskaya that that meeting at Trump Tower, her work on the Magnitsky Act, her effort to do away with the sanctions that we`ve imposed on the Russians, this is being done on part of her work on behalf of the Russian government.  And that, of course, raises the stakes for that meeting in Trump Tower.
 
O`DONNELL:  Congressman Adam Schiff, thank you very much for joining us tonight.  Really appreciate it.

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