Fox News "Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Adam Schiff

Interview

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WALLACE: Democrats have issued a subpoena for the full unredacted Mueller report and they are calling on Attorney General Barr and Special Counsel Mueller to testify before Congress. But they remain divided over how far they should take their investigation of the president.

Joining us now from California, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

Chairman, welcome back to "Fox News Sunday."

REP. ADAM SCHIFF, D-CALIF.: Thank you. Good to be with you.

WALLACE: After the release of the Mueller report, you and some other top House Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that impeachment of the president would be a mistake. Here you are.

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SCHIFF: Many of us do think the president is unfit for office but unless that's a bipartisan conclusion, and impeachment would be doomed to failure. I continue to think that a failed impeachment is not in the national interest.

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WALLACE: But now, since you said that, some top Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren, Senator Warren, is a candidate for president, say the House should do its constitutional duty and begin impeachment proceedings.

Do you still think they are wrong?

SCHIFF: Well, look, I think it's a very difficult decision and we're going to have a caucus about this over the next couple weeks to try to figure out what the best course is. Not for the party, but what's the best course for the country. I think it's certainly the case that an impeachment would be unsuccessful if the Republican Party continues to place party above country, continues essentially to back the president no matter how unethical or dishonest his conduct maybe, and sadly, that's where we are right now.

So, we will have to decide, do we nonetheless go through an impeachment because to do otherwise would signal that somehow this president's conduct is OK, that future presidents can engage in this kind of corruption without consequence, or do we decide that we are better off doing oversight through the context of a -- oversight hearings by the various committees rather than a formal impeachment?

That's going to be a very consequential decision and one that I'm going to reserve judgment on until we have a chance to fully deliberate about it.

WALLACE: Chairman, you've been leading the charge for more than a year that President Trump and his campaign colluded with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 election. Here are just a few examples.

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SCHIFF: This is about as clear evidence as you could find by intent by the campaign to collude with the Russians, to get useful information from the Russians.

I think there's plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy in plain sight.

I did say that there is ample evidence, and indeed there is, of collusion of people in the Trump campaign with the Russians.

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WALLACE: Sir, let's look at what the Mueller report found. And I want to put it up on the screen. Volume one, pages one, two and five: We understood coordination to require an agreement, tacit or expressed, between the Trump campaign and the Russian government on election interference. The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government and its election interference activities.

Mr. Chairman, the special counsel did not find the kind of coordination that you said was there.

SCHIFF: Chris, as you know, and it wish you had played the rest of some of those clips, I went on to say that whether that collusion, that evidence of collusion rises to proof beyond reasonable doubt of the crime of conspiracy was a different question.

And indeed, that distinction is made in the opening pages of the Mueller report, so when the president and his allies repeat this mantra of no collusion, they clearly haven't read or are ignoring the plain language of the report where Bob Mueller says two things. He says we are not going to look into the question of whether it's collusion, that's a common lay terms that can be criminal or noncriminal conduct. We are going to look at the crime of conspiracy.

And on that issue, Bob Mueller says something else that I've been saying frequently, which is the fact that you may not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt a criminal conspiracy doesn't mean there is an absence of evidence of crime. And when I talk, Chris, and you're absolutely right, I talked with us all the time on the course of the last year. When I talked about evidence of collusion in plain sight, I used those words, in plain sight, and appointed to the meetings of Trump Tower that Don Jr. and Kushner and manna Manafort took. What more clear intent to collude could you have done the Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of what was described as an effort to help Mr. Trump in the campaign and Don Jr. saying, if it's what you say, I would love it.

Now, I don't know find you how you f abundant evidence of the attempt to collude. And, in fact --

WALLACE: But, sir --

SCHIFF: Yes?

WALLACE: Let me just say, the Mueller report look at a lot of those specific incidents as you talk about. For instance, the Trump Tower meeting, the fact that Paul Manafort shared polling data with someone from the Ukraine who had ties to the Russians, and here's what they found.

Again, from the report, volume one, page 66: The investigation examined whether these contacts, and they agreed there were contacts, involved or resulted in coordination of a conspiracy with the Trump campaign and Russia, including with respect to Russia providing assistance to the campaign in exchange for any sort of favorable treatment in the future. Based on the available information, the investigation did not establish such coordination.

Here was the reaction after the report came out from White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway.

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KELLYANNE CONWAY, COUNSELOR TO THE PRESIDENT: I was the first person to publicly call for Adam Schiff's resignation from the Intelligence Committee chairman several weeks ago on your network. I'm going to double down on that. Not only should he resign, he should produce the evidence that he said he has.

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WALLACE: There's no question that there were contacts, but I think when he went other Democrats -- I'm not saying it's just you -- talk about collusion, there was the feeling of a working arrangement, an agreement and that somehow the Trump campaign was involved in the hacking of the DNC and Podesta emails, and that there was a back-and-forth, a working relationship as opposed to individual meetings.

Do you have evidence of that kind of working relationship that the Mueller report didn't seem to find?

SCHIFF: Well, Chris, first of all, I never said that the Trump campaign was involved in the hacking itself. What I did say is that, for example, in the Trump Tower meeting there was a clear intent to collude with the Russians. There was a willingness to receive Russian health. The president himself called on the Russians to assist his campaign hacking Hillary Clinton's emails.

And if you look at pages 180 to 190 that discuss that Trump Tower meeting, it wasn't that they found a lack of evidence of all the things that I talked about. In fact, the meeting did take place. In fact, they did offer dirt on Hillary Clinton, in fact, the president's son did say he would love to have it, in fact, the president's son lie about it, in fact, the president was involved in dictating that lie -- all the facts I've set out are proven.

But what Bob Mueller said, the reason he didn't charge Don Jr. and Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort is he found that he could not establish with admissible evidence that Don Jr. was knowing -- knew that he was breaking the law, that that he was essentially ignorant of the law.

Now, with respect to Paul Manafort, we only have one sentence as to why some of that experience didn't know that seeking the help and receiving the help of a foreign government was a crime, and that's something we're going to want to ask Bob Mueller when he testifies. Bob Mueller also said he couldn't establish the value of the dirt they got.

So, this -- I would say this to Kellyanne Conway. The only reason that Mueller says he didn't charge a crime about that Trump Tower meeting was because he believed that Don Jr. was too ignorant of the law to be charged. And because the Russians didn't deliver the dirt they promised.

Not that that campaign didn't try to get dirt. But the Russians didn't live up to their end of the bargain.

So that --

WALLACE: I -- we got limited --

SCHIFF: That's what Mueller found.

WALLACE: We've got limited time. I want to ask you one last question.

Republicans are now calling for a full investigation of how the FBI investigation against the president and the Trump campaign began. And the Mueller report found that the Steele dossier, which had all kinds of information about relationships between President Trump and the Kremlin, that much of that information was either false or impossible to verify.

As chair of the House Intelligence Committee, isn't that a legitimate source of inquiry? Not saying you shouldn't investigate the president, but don't you think the question of exactly how this investigation began, was it a Russians disinformation campaign to try to get -- since they were trying to -- to set Americans against each other to -- not only tarnish Hillary Clinton, but also to tarnish Donald Trump, isn't that a legitimate source of an investigation?

SCHIFF: Chris, you know, the reality is that the Republicans on our committee spent two years investigating exactly that, because, frankly, they weren't that interested in what Russia had done, the systemic attack on our democracy. They spent the focus of their two years investigating the investigators and investigating exactly that question. But Christopher Steele and the FISA application --

WALLACE: But -- but, sir, and I've only got 30 seconds left, we do have new information, the Mueller report discredits a lot of that, says there was no indication that Carter Page did anything wrong. Shouldn't you be looking at that just to find the truth?

SCHIFF: Well, what -- what we are going to be looking at is, we're going to be looking at all of the counterintelligence findings that were the genesis of this investigation. We have requested that on a bipartisan basis, one of the few things that Devin Nunes and I agreed upon.

But let me just be very clear about this. The Mueller report makes it absolutely crystal clear that the initiation of this investigation was not only warranted, but absolutely necessary because it revealed a widespread, systemic effort by the Russians to help the Trump campaign. And -- and that, I think, is the overriding conclusion of this report. And we need to, I think, to -- to put our emphasis on making sure that kind of intervention never happens again.

WALLACE: Chairman Schiff, thank you. Thanks for joining us today.

SCHIFF: Thank you.

WALLACE: Always good to talk with you, sir.

SCHIFF: Thank you.

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