MSNBC "Hardball with Chris Matthews" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi

Interview

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MATTHEWS: Really now? Well, joining ne right now is U.S. Congressman Raja

Krishnamoorthi from Illinois, who serves in the House Intelligence

Committee. Jill Colvin is White House Reporter for the Associated Press,

David Corn, Washington Bureau Chief for Mother Jones, and Malcolm Nance is

author of The Plot To Destroy Democracy.

I have to go to the Congressman first about this because this is an amazing

development. I mean, I shouldn`t be saying this. A republican, Chairman

of a committee, the Intelligence Committee of the Senate, is actually

standing up to Trump, saying we`ve got a problem, we`ve got to talk to your

son.

REP. RAJA KRISHNAMOORTHI (D-IL): This is not a partisan exercise. This is

a republican committee chair in the Senate asking or issuing a subpoena to

Don Trump Jr. to come in and explain himself. There is clear contradiction

in testimony about of this very important meeting in the summer of 2016 at

Trump Tower in New York City. And he`s doing his duty. He`s doing his

job. He`s doing the job of trying to pursue more evidence, more

information and his counterintelligence mission as well.

MATTHEWS: Well, this is amazing. Malcolm, I want to get to you and

everybody on this one. He is asking his son to come in to testify against

the old man. Because he says if he says that the old man knew about that

meeting and meet with Veselnitskaya, the Russian Representative of the

Kremlin, up in the tower in June of 2016 and the old man said, I didn`t

know about it, well, he said my father is a liar and he`s part of this

conspiracy.

MALCOLM NANCE, MSNBC NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: And that`s right. And

that`s the question that I think Burr wants to discuss is, in the

counterintelligence component of the Mueller report, we haven`t seen any of

that. We don`t know about the methodologies the Russians were using. And

that might be what he is trying to assess out. Did the Russians use these

techniques to get to Donald Trump and did Donald Trump actually finally add

that missing part of the game.

MATTHEW: This is your line of the country, the counterintelligence part of

this, the fact that Russians were up to something. Our side, Americans,

through the hands of the Trump, played ball with them.

DAVID CORN, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, MOTHER JONES: That`s exactly right.

And we`ve got to keep sight of what the big picture is here, because the

Trump keep saying over and over again, we got nothing out of this meeting.

That`s not the issue. The issue is they were told that the Russians wanted

to help the Trump campaign. And what did they say? Donald Trump Jr.,

famously, I love it. This meeting was a signal, intentional or not, from

the Trump campaign to the Russians, if you intervene in this election, we

don`t mind. So if Donald Trump, Sr. knows about this, it implicates him in

basically giving a green light to the Russians to do what you are going to

do.

This meeting happened a week before the Russians started leaking

information they had stolen from the democrats, a week before. They must

have felt pretty good that they could get away with that.

MATTHEW: How important is this, Jill, to get to the truth about what the

testimony from Donald Jr. about that meeting and his father`s knowledge

beforehand?

JILL COLVIN, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, ASSOCIATED PRESS: It`s crucially

important. But I think we also have to keep in mind here is that it`s also

illegal to lie to Congress. And this isn`t the only example where they`re

inconsistencies between Don Jr.`s testimony and what was said in the

Mueller report and testimony given in front of Senate committees, not just

this Trump Tower meeting but also the extent to which Don Jr. discussed the

Moscow Trump Tower project in Moscow. Michael Cohen telling committees

that, in fact, they talked about it much more frequently than Don Jr.

admitted when he was speaking to the House committee.

MATTHEWS: Well, by standing firmly behind it, he`s subpoenaed the

President`s son, Senator Burr of North Carolina. He`s defending Congress`s

right to fulfill its oversight responsibilities. The Washington Post

reports that as negotiations over Trump Jr.`s testimony dragged on, Burr

became increasingly frustrated and believed that Trump Jr. was defying the

committee`s authority.

Trump allies are now directing their attacks at Bur, of course, saying that

a republican shouldn`t cross the President`s family. What is this, The

Romanoffs again? A person close to Trump Jr. tells NBC News, catch this

talk for -- well, for gangster talk, no lawyer would ever agree to allow

their client to participate in what is obviously a P.R. stunt from a so-

called republican senator, too cowardly to stand up to his boss. Mark

Warner and the -- his boss is Mark Warner, and the rest of the resistance,

democrats, these guys sound like thugs, like characters out of a mobster

movie. Several republican lawmakers have also filed suit and questioning

Burr`s subpoena, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Congressman, this gets to the thing I`ve wondered about. Well, I`m

skeptical. Republican senators, republican members of your House are, in

fact, elected officials of the first branch of government, the Congress.

Why don`t they stand up for the prerogatives and responsibilities of

Congress to get to the truth with their oversight role? Why don`t they

have the integrity? Forget whose side they are on politically. They are

on the side of the Congress when it comes to the constitution. And they

don`t say that. And, finally, Burr does this. And they treat him like he

is to be shunned in some religious community. He should be shunned because

he did this.

KRISHNAMOORTHI: That`s exactly right, Chris. I have to say that there is

one other instance where actually another republican has actually called

for more information and that is actually Devin Nunes. Nunes and Schiff,

Chairman Schiff on my committee, together, have asked for the

counterintelligence findings from the Department of Justice because we are

statutorily obligated to receive that information.

So, hopefully, there are more republicans like Mr. Nunes and Senator Burr

who actually want us to perform our constitutional duty to oversight. At

the end of the day, this is not partisan. This is about whether the

President is accountable to anybody. And in this situation, I think

Senator Burr is absolutely right. He needs to get to the bottom of what

exactly happened with regard to the conversation between Trump Jr. and his

father.

One issue with regard to counterintelligence, I just want to point out,

which is if it is a lie, what Don Jr. has been saying with regard to the

conversation with his father and the Russians know that, that in itself is

called kompromat. That is information that could be used against Don Jr.,

who, by the way, is the head of the Trump organization to get to his

father. So this is something that is very serious.

MATTHEWS: Welcome, your line.

NANCE: Yes. Well, the Russians know all about that meeting, right?

Natalia Veselnitskaya, she was an agent of the -- essentially the Attorney

General of Russia and was sent there on a mission to see if the Trump team

would bite at what they gave them. We still don`t know whether they really

bit in this, took and used it. But you know what? Maybe Senator Burr is

finally standing up for the constitution. Maybe it`s just one step too

much to allow Donald Trump Jr. to get away with what he said before and he

wants to put him on the record and ensure that his committee is not being

used as a tool by extension of Moscow.

MATTHEWS: Let`s talk about the political gain and legal gain on the White

House side. Although Donald Trump Jr. doesn`t work for his father

technically in the White House, Trump`s Acting Chief of Staff, Mick

Mulvaney, told CBS news that they should have gotten a heads-up about the

subpoena.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICK MULVANEY, ACTING WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: The fact that the

President`s son got a subpoena from a republican-led committee, I have no

difficulty in bipartisanship, but to subpoena the President of the United

States` son and not at least get a heads-up, I thought, was, let`s say, bad

form.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: Jill, I`ve been thinking about this for weeks. I watched

Pelosi. I don`t think she is indifferent to this thing. I think she is

calculating the politics. At some point, I think she might be moved less

by the concerns about the number of seats she might endanger in 2020 in the

House to the really paramount question, will she let this president get

away with obstruction of justice, when that means obstructing Congress?

COLVIN: Well, her language has certainly been shifting over the last

couple of days or describing the situation here as a constitutional crisis

where you have a White House that is refusing to comply with these

congressional requests. The president has issued a blanket directive that

he doesn`t want anybody, obviously, his son included here, participating in

any of this. And you`ve got folks on the Hill who are desperate for this

information, who are considering every tool at their disposal, talking

about finding people, talking about whether there are jails somewhere in

the Senate that you could hold people. You don`t have to go that far just

trying to figure out what they can do. So we`ll see.

But she still is really stuck with the idea, it seems, from her public

comments that impeachment will be bad for democrats and could compromise

the election for democrats.

MATTHEWS: But the failure to act -- I want to go back to what you and I

have studied for years, which is this history of scandal. Nixon went down

on Article Three, of course, because he obstructed the investigation of

Watergate, right? Joe McCarthy went down because he obstructed the

investigation of Joe McCarthy. That`s what actually -- he couldn`t say he

didn`t abuse witnesses, they all do that. But they could get him on

obstructing the committee investigating him.

And it seems to me if you let that picket (ph) broken, if you let them just

break your lands right in your face and say, nice try, buddy, you`re

finished, I think that gets even to the most partisan of politicians, I

think.

CORN: I think you`re right. But I believe there is a story here that has

to be told. 3 percent of Americans said they read the Mueller report.

That`s probably an overestimation, right?

MATTHEWS: What`s the cardinal number there? How many people?

CORN: I don`t know. Maybe one --

MATTHEWS: I think you are way over.

CORN: Yes. 1 percent read the whole report. And if that`s --

MATTHEWS: (INAUDIBLE) 1 percent, some of these candidates have much to

say.

CORN: So what was so compelling about Watergate? Some of us are old

enough to remember. It was a story that developed through congressional

hearings. Now, Don Jr. probably won`t testify, and we`ll see how much Burr

will fight that, but there are other people to bring up there talk about

what happened with the campaign and how the Trump campaign aided and

abetted the Russian attack by denying it (ph). And there are people who

they can fight to bring up on the obstruction issues, taxes, emoluments.

You`ve got to tell the public the story and then maybe that will lead to

impeachment. But oversight, truth first, and they need to fight to do

that.

MATTHEWS: Well, let`s go around that because that`s, to me, the big

question. The fact that Mueller didn`t find a crime in taking help from a

foreign government because he wasn`t sure about the law or the knowledge of

the law by Donald Trump Jr. and the President right now, President-elect,

Congressman, the big defense of Trump is he didn`t know anything. The

bigger defense of his son is he knows nothing. The fact that he would know

was illegal to take money from a foreign government in a presidential

campaign. And so that`s the thin defense he has.

But counterintelligence piece of this, the prime reason we had this

investigation, apart from all the partisanship on both sides, find out what

Russians did to us, what they could do again and what role did Americans

play with them. And I think that`s a bigger question, the

counterintelligence question, anything we`ve looked to. And the question

is, are we being held back from the truth right now?

KRISHNAMOORTHI: A 100 percent. There were 140 contacts at least between

Trump officials and Russian officials. Even if those contacts did not rise

to the level of criminal conspiracy, what happened during those

conversations? Was there information that would be embarrassing that would

be somehow used against these officials and endanger our national security?

That is something that hopefully people from both sides can start to see is

very important for our long-term national interests.

And it also helps to explain like why the heck does the President keep

cozying up to Vladimir Putin. We still don`t understand the answer to that

question. Why does he have one hour conversation with Vladimir Putin and

he then recites to the rest of the world that Vladimir Putin doesn`t want

to have anything to do with Venezuela when the Intelligence Community says

with one voice that, yes, the Russians are involved in Venezuela.

So this is really something that we still are trying to figure out and

getting to the counterintelligence aspects of the information that has been

gathered that we should receive that we haven`t received yet starts to

answer those questions.

MATTHEWS: Well, again, the power and the drama of a testimony for maybe

over several days from Robert Mueller on national television, where he`s

asked about the counterintelligence sub. I want to go to Malcolm on that,

Congressman. That would be, to me, great theater and great history. It

will be recording history in real-time.

NANCE: Not just recording history, we have an obligation to history. I

mean, I`m a strict constructionist when it comes down to exercising the

ability to assess out (ph) what could be crimes or could be malfeasance on

the part of the government. Robert Mueller started this investigation, or,

actually, Jim Comey started it, as a counterintelligence investigation to

see if Russia was influencing and impact our elections. Well, maybe we

don`t need to see it as a theater. Maybe we need to see it as the great

education of the American public as to what a foreign power has done to us.

And if we don`t do it, they will do it again.

MATTHEWS: I think we have to read Russian Roulette from your book, because

I think this kind of history is already there. And I think people who want

to find out what the Russians did to us and what we did with them is

paramountly important to us going into 2020 and going into the future.

Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, than k you so much, our democrat from

Illinois. Jill Colvin, you`re great. I sound like Trump, but you really

are. Thank you, David Corn. I love Associated Press Reporters because of

the last absolute real straight reporting that you get from the people who

don`t make any money.

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