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

Interview

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O'DONNELL:  Hard to see who works harder, Kelly Armstrong or Donald Trump. 
 
Leading our discussion today is Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff of California.  He is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. 
 
Congressman Schiff, your subpoena tonight, that seems to have bipartisan support on your committee with Devin Nunes.  How are you achieving a bipartisan approach to a subpoena where the judiciary committee can't? 
 
REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA):  Well, this is probably the last venue you thought that would happen, but, look, you know, the ranking member has his own reasons for wanting to get the underlying evidence behind the report.  We have our reasons and there is that confluence of interests to make sure that the Justice Department follows the law. 
 
We both understand there is a statutory obligation to provide all foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence.  It's not discretionary, and we're insisting on the information.  We may have to go down the same road in our committee that the Judiciary Committee did if the Justice Department again stonewalls and makes this overbroad and in support of a claim of executive privilege. 
 
O'DONNELL:  Is it your sense that Devin Nunes is hoping to find all these things that he's been suggesting for a while now about the beginn ings of Russian interference in the election, that there could be things in the Mueller report that would be very damaging somehow to the Democrats in this story? 
 
SCHIFF:  Well, I'm sure his motivation is not to expose the evidence of the president's obstruction of justice or all of the interactions between the Trump campaign and the Russians and the issue of collusion.  I don't think that's where he's coming from. 
 
But look, I'll let him speak for himself.  I'm just glad that we've had the support to press the department to comply with the law.  And at the end of the day, this is about more than just this president, more than just this investigation.  What's at stake is whether Congress can do its job, whether, if an administration is corrupt or malfeasanced or just incompetent, that can be exposed and corrective action can be taken. 
 
If we can't do it vis-a-vis Donald Trump, it means that every president who follows him will be equally above the law. 
 
O'DONNELL:  So what does your subpoena mean to the timing of the vote in the full house on the resolution that we just saw today come out of the Judiciary Committee? 
 
SCHIFF:  Well, the advantage and the strength of our subpoenas relies on different legal grounds than the judiciary subpoena.  So, we have the National Security Act, the Patriot Act and other provisions that require the department to turn these materials over to Congress.  We have a separate grand jury exception that applies.  We don't have to initiate an impeachment proceeding, nor a plenary to impeachment proceeding.  They're required to provide this information. 
 
So, we have an independent case to make, and that gives us, if necessary, an alternate argument to make in court why this material needs to be provided.  So, we'll go forward.  It's more difficult, I think, for them to write this office and partisan exercise when both the chair and ranking member have demanded that the department --
 
O'DONNELL:  Do you any sense of when the full House will vote on the contempt of Congress of attorney general? 
 
SCHIFF:  You know, I think a lot of these issues are coming to a head in the various committees, and I think it would make sense to at least consolidate the date when we take up these contempt resolutions, if there are multiple resolutions, so they can be adjudicated at one time and we don't take up time every week to relitigate this. 
 
But at the end of the day, we're going to use the mechanism necessary to make sure we can do our oversight.  We may have to look if the core process takes too long in using Congress' inherent contempt power.  We may look at fencing money for these agencies so they can use it until they comply. 
 
We're going to have to use whatever tools we can. 
 
O'DONNELL:  What is your sense of what's happening in the Senate Intelligence Committee the day after the Senate majority leader says case closed, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenas the president's son? 
 
SCHIFF:  Well, look, I think in the Senate Intel Committee, they don't want to be messed with by these witnesses.  And when they have someone who is -- where there are questions about truthfulness if that's the issue, or there's additional facts that have come to light that they need to explore and they feel they're getting the runaround, they're going to use compulsion to bring people in.  That's as it should be. 
 
You know, we have concerns about Don Jr.'s testimony before our committee, and we've had concerns about others.  We may bring back some of the witnesses we had in before.  Others like Erik Prince we chose not to bring back, we chose to refer to the Justice Department for potential perjury prosecution, but we're going through those analyses now. 
 
O'DONNELL:  So in the case of Erik Prince, you believe just on what you see in the Mueller report, and what you see in your transcripts with him, do you see perjury as you look?
 
SCHIFF:  You know, Prince's testimony was so demonstratively false before our committee that we felt compelled to make the referral and show side by side what he told us and what was revealed in the special counsel's report.  How he told us that his meeting with Dmitriev, the Russian state banker, was pure coincidence.  That he happened to go halfway around the world and run into the Seychelles and bumped into this guy in a bar, invited to meet him by the crown prince. 
 
The number of his meetings he said he had, the topics he said he had, whether he had advance notice of the meeting, all that stuff, is contradicted by the Mueller report, by witnesses who spoke to Mueller and often by Prince himself.  Now, there may be issues about whether they can prosecute that because of the admissibility or the availability of witnesses and testimony, but nonetheless, the testimony was so palpably false, we felt the need to refer it. 
 
O'DONNELL:  Do you feel the need to hear from Donald Trump Jr. again?  Will you subpoena Donald Trump Jr.? 
 
SCHIFF:  We may.  We haven't made that decision yet.  We're looking through what are the most important witnesses to bring back first, which witnesses can shed additional light?  And we've had that dilemma with other witnesses as well where we thought they were less than truthful.  Do we bring them back in and give them an opportunity to try to get their story straight, or do we make a referral, or are there other purposes for bringing them back? 
 
O'DONNELL:  What's your timetable on those kinds of decisions? 
 
SCHIFF:  You know, we're making them an ongoing basis, so we have made outreach to witnesses.  We're starting with those that we believe may be cooperative that can shed light on issues.  We're dealing with others privately right now who are resisting and we're trying to work out an agreement for them to come in and testify before we have to compel them.  So all of that is ongoing and all that for the most part is outside the public eye. 
 
O'DONNELL:  On Donald Trump Jr., there are a couple things.  One is he had said to Congress that he had very little involvement in the Moscow Trump Tower.  Michael Cohen said he was heavily involved and he talked to him at least 10 times and during the campaign.  That's one possible change, difference in Donald Trump Jr.'s testimony. 
 
The other is, in the Mueller report, Michael Cohen said he heard Donald Trump Jr. telling his father about the meeting with Russians in Trump Tower before the meeting occurred.  That's also in the Mueller report. 
 
That's not something that Donald Trump Jr. said to either committee when he spoke to the committees.  Are those the areas that you'd like to clarify with Donald Trump? 
 
SCHIFF:  You know, those are certainly some of the areas.  One of the issues we had with Don Jr. was his simple refusal to answer whole categories of questions.  And this was not the case alone with Don Jr.  Steve Bannon did the same thing, Corey Lewandowski, Hope Hicks, there were whole sets of questions that these witnesses refused to answer. 
 
And this, again, proves just what a falsehood it is when Bill Barr talks about how cooperative the president has been with the investigations.  These witnesses often told us that they would not answer the questions under instructions from the White House.  We would ask them, are you asserting some sort of privilege?  They would say, no, we've just been asked basically not to cooperate. 
 
So with respect to a number of these areas, we simply got no answers.  With respect to others, we got answers that we have serious questions about their veracity. 
 
O'DONNELL:  And we should remind viewers that that was when the committee was under Republican control.  And the rules of these interactions were being set by the Republican majority on the committee, basically, and that no one was under subpoena.  They could all get up and walk out of the room if they wanted to. 
 
SCHIFF:  You know, yes.  And the most graphic example was actually Steve Bannon who came in -- and when he came in, he was no longer Breitbart, he was no longer in favor in the White House, so the Republicans took umbrage when he refused to answer questions.  They felt there were no repercussions for them to look like they were serious about the investigation. 
 
He refused -- they actually subpoenaed him on the spot, but when we tried to get them to enforce the subpoena, hold him in contempt because he refused to answer the questions, that was a bridge too far.  And it shows just how willing they were to go through the show of it, the show of an investigation, but not the reality of it when it came to compelling answers to questions. 
 
O'DONNELL:  Chairman Adam Schiff, thank you very much for joining us tonight. 
 
SCHIFF:  Thank you.
 
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