CNN "The Situation Room" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Adam Schiff

Interview

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BLITZER: Sunlen Serfaty up on Capitol Hill, thank you.

Now let's hear from a major player in the House investigations of the president and the new court ruling on subpoenas.

We're joined by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Adam Schiff of California.

Congressman, thanks so much for coming in.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D), CALIFORNIA: Great to be with you.

BLITZER: Let me get your reaction, this federal judge in New York, second time in three days, ruled against the president, in favor of what you're doing, congressional Democrats, this time involving Deutsche Bank and Capital One.

What message does this send to the Trump administration?

SCHIFF: It sends a message that two different judges, same conclusion, not just that you're wrong, but your arguments don't even raise serious legal questions. And what's more, we're not going to be a party to an effort to delay Congress in the discharge of its oversight responsibilities. We're not going to stay our rulings. We're not going to result in essentially obstruction by delay.

And so another very powerful ruling, another judge very comfortable and clear on the merits, another rebuke of the Trump legal arguments, which are, by the way, very much the same as the Justice Department arguments.

So, a resounding win, I think, for our system of checks and balances.

BLITZER: What are you hoping to learn if you get these documents involving Deutsche Bank and the other bank?

SCHIFF: Well, I think we saw underscored again in the recent "New York Times" article why it's prudent for Congress to look into this.

There are reports that this bank, Deutsche Bank, for example, which has this history of laundering Russian money, that set up a special unit to make sure that it flagged suspicious transactions, has transactions that people inside the bank say should be flagged, should be brought to the attention -- attention of the Treasury Department that involved Russians, that involved foreign parties.

And they don't follow their own procedures. They don't make the reports, decisions made by the personal wealth division basically overruling those that are paid basically to look at, keep an eye out for suspicious financial transactions.

So, this needs to be looked into by the Congress. And both our committee and the Financial Services Committee have worked together on this litigation.

BLITZER: So are you concerned that Robert Mueller and his team didn't spend enough time looking into this part of the investigation?

On February 10, you said, if the special counsel hasn't subpoenaed Deutsche Bank, he can't be doing much of a money laundering investigation.

SCHIFF: I think it's clear, now that we have seen the Mueller report, that this is something that was not, at least in the special counsel's opinion, or Rod Rosenstein's, for all we know, not within the scope of what he was going to look at.

Now, it was within the scope of what he could look at. But there's no indication in his report that he did. And I think it's negligent for the Congress to ignore this. He may have viewed his mandate narrowly: I'm going to look into the social media campaign. I'm going to look into the hacking and dumping.

But in terms of other things like money laundering, that's beyond what he was prepared to do. But it leaves the country vulnerable, because, if this is a form of financial entanglement that Trump or Kushner have with foreign parties that's influencing U.S. policy, it needs to be exposed.

BLITZER: Well, do you and your committee know something that is leading you in this direction?

SCHIFF: Well, we have had a concern for some time about whether the financial contacts between Trump and the Russians go beyond what the public knows, because, for example, the president was lying about his business dealings with the Moscow Trump Tower deal.

[18:15:03]

They were seeking the Kremlin's help during the presidential campaign to make this transaction go forward, deceiving the country about it. And the Kremlin was helping them deceive our country.

When it came to light, the Kremlin issued a statement saying, we never responded to these overtures, when the Kremlin had responded. So there are -- there's good reason to be concerned. Whether we will ultimately find money laundering, time will tell, but it would be negligent for us not to do our due diligence.

BLITZER: But wouldn't that have been part of Robert Mueller's investigation, if there were some shady deals going on between the Trump Organization and the Russians?

SCHIFF: If he considered his mandate to be narrow -- and it appears that he did -- he looked into really only whether there was an agreement between the Trump campaign and the Russians to interfere in the election.

So if there was laundering of money that was unrelated to the election or trying to influence it, Mueller may have decided, OK, that's beyond what I'm going to look at. Or maybe Mueller wanted to look at it, and Rod Rosenstein says, you won't go there.

We won't know until we bring Bob Mueller in.

BLITZER: The speaker, Nancy Pelosi, she says her strategy is working. They're moving in the right direction. She's holding back from formerly calling for the start of impeachment procedures.

Is her strategy working?

SCHIFF: Well, it's certainly bearing fruit.

And we have now two courts that have ruled in our favor, that have expedited matters by doing so very quickly, by not staying the decisions on appeal. We're also seeing -- and it may be a result of seeing the writing on the wall in decisions like these -- we're seeing the Justice Department now producing documents to the Intelligence Committee that earlier they had refused to provide.

So we are making headway. But it is still excruciatingly slow. And there's a whole host of other witnesses that they're still holding back, people like Don McGahn, that the country have every right to hear from. And it may be necessary to escalate the enforcement actions on the House floor or undertake an impeachment.

But, right now, I think we are seeing very positive results in the courts. And we're starting to see at least a break in the dam when it comes to the Justice Department withholding information from Congress.

BLITZER: For the first time today, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said the Trump administration, the president of the United States is engaged in a cover-up.

Do you agree?

SCHIFF: I absolutely agree with that.

And it's hard to look at the Mueller report and reach any other conclusion. Whether you consider it a crime or not -- and I think it was -- these multiple acts by the president to obstruct justice, to discourage people from cooperating with authorities, to reward people who refuse to cooperate, all of that is properly described as a cover- up.

And the actions that they are taking since to prevent the country from hearing from these witnesses, I think, is a continuation of that cover-up. The fact that this is so out in the open now doesn't make it any less offensive. But I think it certainly meets the plain understanding of that term.

BLITZER: You're saying it's a crime, but doesn't fall under the category -- a cover-up, wouldn't they fall into the category of high crimes and misdemeanors?

SCHIFF: It certainly could.

I think a lot of the conduct that Bob Mueller outlines in the report could very well meet the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors, as well as other actions that the administration may be contemplating.

When they -- when the president talks at his political rallies about working with his attorney general to perhaps investigate, prosecute his political rivals, that is another high-level abuse of his office. So the list, I think, is substantial. It may be growing.

The obstruction of Congress certainly increases the -- I think the weight of those...

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BLITZER: But if it's a high crime, or even a crime, isn't that worthy of immediately beginning impeachment procedures?

SCHIFF: Well, look, I think if we had a Republican Party that was willing to undertake that process in good faith and follow the facts, it would be one thing.

We don't have that. We have a cult of personality around the president. And so that puts Democrats in the very difficult position of trying to determine, should we put the country through this, when we can expect there's going to be no Republican support in the Senate?

Is that the right thing for the country? And I think the speaker is right to view this solely through that prism, not try to do the political calculus, does this help us or hurt us politically, but decide, is this the right thing for the country?

BLITZER: So, this is a political decision you're making, since you need a two-thirds vote in the Senate to convict?

Even if he's impeached with a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, you're not going to get the conviction in the Senate. And, as a result, you're holding back. Is that what you're saying?

SCHIFF: It's not -- no, quite the opposite.

I'm not saying that that's a political calculus. I'm saying, we have to -- we have to decide whether this is the best thing for the country, knowing what the result is going to be. We can't ignore the facts that, apart from now one House Republican, none of the Republicans are willing to question anything this president is doing.

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And so does it make sense for us to put the country through this? Now, we may get there anyway, in the face of this obstructionism. But I do think that this is a wrenching, divisive experience we would be putting the country through. And that's not something we undertake lightly.

It may be that we have to, but it's not something that we should rush to do.

BLITZER: You have now reached an agreement, we understand, with the Justice Department to get at least certain documents involving counterintelligence that you really wanted from the Mueller investigation.

Is this information that wasn't included in the Mueller report?

SCHIFF: These are documents that were, at least in significant part, referred to in the Mueller report. They're documents that we know are in existence. There are 12 categories of documents.

But we chose these categories, both because we think they're important and relevant to our oversight work, but also because they were clearly not privileged. And they were also clearly counterintelligence or foreign intelligence information that we have a statutory right to obtain.

This was a way of testing, is the Justice Department going to simply oppose everything? And, quite last-minute, literally went up to about midnight the day before we were going to take up an enforcement action in our committee, the department relented and said, OK. Now, it's important to point out this is just the first of what we consider rolling document production. So, these 12 sets of documents are just the beginning of the document production. They're not the end, by any means.

BLITZER: When are you going to get these documents?

SCHIFF: They should start to be produced this week, and we expect them all to be produced by the end of next week.

BLITZER: So, are you going to make them public, or just review them on a classified basis?

SCHIFF: We're going to review the documents. I don't know at this point whether any of them will be classified, or some.

And then we will make a decision down the road about what can be disclosed. There may very well be leads that we need to follow that are raised in these documents, and it wouldn't make sense to be public about it.

And then, of course, because there are other equities involved, we would need to consider that in terms of any kind of disclosure.

BLITZER: And so, when you say these are counterintelligence documents, do they involve any suspicions of the president's relationship with Russia or with other countries, for that matter?

SCHIFF: Well, to give you an illustration, there any number of actors and incidents that are mentioned in the Mueller report with a lot of unanswered and open questions.

To give you one illustration -- and I'm not saying this is one of the documents areas that we're looking at in terms of these sets of documents -- but we know that Paul Manafort was providing polling data to someone linked to Russian intelligence.

What do we know about that? What efforts were made to find out why that was taking place? Mueller says they weren't able to determine certain conclusions about it. But how far did Mueller go down this road?

BLITZER: Are you surprised Mueller didn't do more on that?

SCHIFF: I don't know, at this point, what obstacles they ran into.

I have raised my concerns about the president -- not pressing for an interview with the president. And the same president who's claiming he doesn't do cover-ups, well, he was unwilling to answer questions under oath about his own actions.

BLITZER: Mueller in the report said they tried for a year to get a formal interview with the president, and couldn't.

SCHIFF: Absolutely. And, in other respects too, we have profound questions about how far the Mueller team pushed. We're looking, as you know, into whether the attorneys around the president and his family participated in any way in the false testimony that Michael Cohen made to our committee.

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BLITZER: You're referring to Jay Sekulow, the president's private attorney?

SCHIFF: Yes, among others.

And it appears that this was not something that the special counsel pressed because of concerns of attorney-client privilege. But, of course, there's an exception for crime or fraud.

And one of the things we want to ask Bob Mueller is, how much did you press? Why didn't you go further? Were you concerned that the litigation over that privilege, like efforts to get the president to cooperate and testify, would simply take too long?

Because, if that's the case, then maybe that's something that Congress needs to pursue.

BLITZER: And speaking of Michael Cohen, newly unsealed warrants, just unsealed, involving Michael Cohen show that he exchanged more than 1,000 calls and text messages with the CEO of a company linked to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. The communications started -- actually started on Election Day 2016.

You questioned Cohen, your committee, behind closed doors. Did you know about this?

SCHIFF: Well, we certainly knew about some of the contacts. I don't know whether we knew about the volume that has been disclosed.

But the connection between Vekselberg, the company and companies that he's affiliated with, the cousin that does business or related as well, these are all areas that we have looked into, that we continue to look into.

We're also looking into the inaugural committee and money that was funneled into the inaugural committee. So, these are all areas that we continue to have a deep interest in.

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BLITZER: How do you explain that timeline, more than 1,000 text messages and calls, but starting on Election Day?

SCHIFF: Well, there could be a number of explanations for that in terms of the business that Michael Cohen was pursuing.

There could be more insidious explanations in terms of the motivations on Vekselberg's part. I don't know the answer. But like many other things that have been left open by the Mueller report, we have to try to find out.

BLITZER: I want to get your reaction to what the attorney general, Bill Barr, told "The Wall Street Journal" earlier this week. And I will put it up on the screen.

"If you destroy the presidency and make it an errand boy for Congress, we're going to be a much weaker and more divided nation."

That's the attorney general of the United States. What's your reaction?

SCHIFF: Well, this is what Barr thinks his role is, which is, protect the president at all costs, Consider the Congress essentially a nuisance, not a co-equal branch of government.

And his interview with "The Wall Street Journal," I think, was very telling. His interview with FOX was equally telling. When he was asked, for example, about Don McCann being instructed to fire Bob Mueller, have Mueller fired, Bill Barr's answer was, no, no, he didn't say he should be fired. He said he should be removed, as if that's a distinction that makes a difference.

That kind of sophistry is something we would expect from Rudy Giuliani, not from the attorney general of the United States. But it shows just how much Bill Barr believes his job is to place this president above the law.

And that is not what our Constitution contemplated. I think it makes Bill Barr a very dangerous attorney general. The fact that Bill Barr thinks that Donald Trump could have gotten ridden of Mueller at any time if he felt the investigation was unfair means that any president who is being investigated can fire the prosecutor because they think it's unfair.

It also puts at risk all of the investigations Mueller referred to obliquely that had been farmed out to other prosecutors, because, if you can get rid of Mueller, it stands to reason you can get rid of anyone else doing any other investigation that the president considers unfair.

BLITZER: Congressman Schiff, please come back, especially after you get all those documents, those counterintelligence documents. We'd love to know what they contain.

SCHIFF: Thank you, Wolf.

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