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

Interview

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O`DONNELL:  Leading off our discussion tonight, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff of California.  He`s the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a former federal prosecutor. 
 
Congressman Schiff, I want to use all of your skill sets including former prosecutor to go to Senator Blumenthal`s question.  Have you ever heard of a U.S. attorney or federal prosecutor of any rank writing a letter of rebuke as it was characterized to the attorney general to his boss, the attorney general? 
 
REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA):  No, I think it would be unthinkable except in the most extreme circumstances which I`ve never seen before. 
 
And here you had the spectacle of Barr saying basically Mueller is nothing more than a garden variety U.S. attorney.  He works for me.  When he gave me the report, he was done. 
 
Well, clearly, he wasn`t done when he provided that report.  He was still working with Barr, purportedly, on the redactions.  And more than that, he felt it necessary to weigh in with his boss and say, you`re misrepresenting my work.  You`re misrepresenting two years of work.  You have provided out of context.
 
And basically I think what Mueller was reacting to was Barr was feeding this false narrative being pushed out by the White House.  And I can only imagine how Mueller and his team must have felt seeing it happen in real- time.  And now that we have seen the letter, we see just how serious the flaws were in what Barr had been representing to the country. 
 
O`DONNELL:  What aspects of the attorney general`s testimony today did you have your strongest personal reaction to? 
 
SCHIFF:  Well, look, I think he testified very plainly, falsely, previously to Congress.  So, first, he misled the country with his false summaries.  And then he came into Congress and he was asked, are you aware of reservations by the Mueller team, and his answer was again, as you say, an equivocal no.  That was just flat out false.  And he knew it. 
 
You know, one thing you have to recognize in Barr, he`s not a stupid man.   He`s a very smart lawyer.  He understood exactly what was being asked of him, and he deliberately misled the Congress. 
 
This is the highest law enforcement officer in the country and when he was asked about that today to try to suggest that -- well, I was talking about Mueller`s team when I answered that question, not Mueller.  That`s absurd. 
 
And I`ll tell you, if he was overseeing a prosecution for perjury, he would never accept that kind of a bogus explanation.  But I think on a far more significant level what I found troubling about the attorney general today is he seemed to be saying that if Bob Mueller wasn`t going to either say he was guilty or say he was innocent, then he should have never done the investigation. 
 
Now, what does that mean?  Well, it means that there`s no way to hold a president accountable.  And maybe that`s what is Barr is really after because if you accept the OLC opinion and Barr hasn`t said that he doesn`t, then it does follow from that as Mueller suggested that if I can`t indict a sitting president because they can`t clear their name, then I shouldn`t say I would indict them but for this policy because then you`re placing the same stigma over the office. 
 
So, I don`t agree with Mueller.  I think you can indict a sitting president.  But if you are going to be bound by the OLC opinion and Barr would be the first one to say Bob Mueller, you will follow DOJ policy.
 
O`DONNELL:  Yes.
 
SCHIFF:  If you`ve got to follow it, you`ve got to follow it.
 
And so, Barr is being completely disingenuous.  He`s being completely disingenuous in saying that I had to make this decision myself to clear the president.  That`s baloney. 
 
And to arrogate that decision to himself to use the president`s language, false language, no collusion, no obstruction, spying, all those kind of buzz words, he has made himself essentially the hand maiden of the president, not the attorney general of the United States. 
 
And why someone at this point in their career would be willing to so sacrifice his integrity, his reputation, everything in the service of this is unethical president will forever be a mystery to me.  But he`s not alone.  Obviously, there are many others around Trump who are doing the same thing. 
 
O`DONNELL:  And he repeatedly said under oath today that he didn`t understand why the special counsel did not reach a charging decision when the special counsel explains it very clearly that any non-lawyer could understand. 
 
Let me go to the question Rachel had actually at the beginning of this hour which is OK, is there any point to continuing with Attorney General Barr?  Should the House of Representatives simply move on to be Robert Mueller, to Don McGahn, to much more important witnesses really than the attorney general? 
 
SCHIFF:  Well, I think Rachel is exactly right that at this point, there`s one witness that matters more than any another.  And that`s Bob Mueller.  We can`t rely on anything Bill Barr has to say. 
 
Now, Barr is characterizing his verbal discussions with Mueller.  Who can rely on that after this guy`s record?  So, we need to hear from Bob Mueller.  We need to hear why he made the decisions he made, why he didn`t reach certain decisions.  We need to hear his thoughts on the significance of the evidence, what he intended for Congress to do in terms of its role. 
 
I don`t have any confidence we can rely on Barr for that whatsoever.  But there may come a time to have Barr when we`re examining Barr`s own conduct, and it also may be inspector general investigation of Barr`s conduct may be warranted here. 
 
But I think Mueller`s very important.  We have demanded he come before the intelligence committee, as well.  We still don`t have anything about the counterintelligence investigation which is where this all began.  And Mueller makes reference to it in his report and says we had embedded counterintelligence agents who sent their own findings back to headquarters.  We still don`t have that. 
 
So, we`re going to bring Mueller into our committee, as well.  That`s I think going to be the most important testimony. 
 
O`DONNELL:  Would some of that have to be closed door testimony? 
 
SCHIFF:  Some of it will.  You know, our intention is to do as much as we can in open session, and then go to closed session where, you know, we may have foreign intelligence on issues of compromise involving the president or those around him.  You know, if the Moscow Trump Tower wasn`t disclosed, for example, in the in report itself, that`s the kind of thing that might be disclosed in a counterintelligence investigation. 
 
Hey, this guy has got a potential business deal.  The Russians are dangling lots of money.  This is influencing his policy, his views, et cetera.  That`s the kind of thing you would see in a counterintelligence report. 
 
But it came in the context of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia and the context of lying to the committee and obstruction, but what is in the counterintelligence report we still don`t know. 
 
O`DONNELL:  As you sit here tonight, are you worried about the timetable?  Do you have any idea when you would actually hear from Robert Mueller? 
 
SCHIFF:  I don`t think they can put Mueller off much longer. 
 
O`DONNELL:  Why not?  Why can`t they? 
 
SCHIFF:  Because I think they realize the public pressure is going to be too great.  And that`s why I think Barr has conceded I`m not going to oppose Mueller testifying before Congress. 
 
What he has wanted to do is part of the same pattern which is even though Mueller had a summary of his own, even though Mueller wanted to release his own summary, I released my summary to set a false narrative.  That wasn`t enough though. 
 
When the Mueller report was going to come out and I knew it was going to come out and it was bad for the president, I decided I was going to give my own be preview that morning.  Of course, that was completely unnecessary except in the service of the president.  So, he gives his false summary again.  And then he gives false testimony.
 
All of this is buying time for the narrative to settle in.  His testimony before Congress, his insistence and in our discussions they`re like -- their position at justice is first Barr and they be we can talk about other things. 
 
It`s all part of the same.  We`ll have Barr testify.  We will run the clock longer so that the Barr version of events which is essentially the Trump version of events will have longer to take hold before the country actually gets to hear from the man himself Bob Mueller.  So, it`s all part of the same tactic. 
 
O`DONNELL:  Well, we don`t know how it`s going to be cracked. 
 
Chairman Schiff, thank you very much for joining us tonight.  Really, really appreciate it. 
 
SCHIFF:  Thank you.

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