MSNBC "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" - Transcript: "Trump denies assault allegation."
Interview
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O`DONNELL: We`ll discuss impeachment with Congressman Himes and Chairman Smith, but that`s not all. We will get their reactions to the Trump administration`s treatment of children at the southern border. And later in this hour, we will hear from a lawyer who has actually visited those children and seen the conditions they are living in and the conditions that some of them have died in. That lawyer will tell you that the conditions that she saw on her trip last week are the worst, the worst conditions that she has ever seen children being held at the southern border. One of the children that her team met with is five months old. Republicans are not so much trying to defend the conditions that the children are suffering in as much as they are trying to blame Democrats for those conditions. The president threatened to launch wide scale deportation raids all over the country this week, and then this weekend called off his own menacing threat. It was the domestic equivalent of what the president did with Iran last week, threatening Iran with retaliation for Iran shooting down an American drone and then congratulating himself for calling off the retaliatory strike against Iran that the president himself had ordered. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith, was part of the congressional leadership meeting at the White House with the president when the president was considering how to retaliate against Iran. So he got as close an exposure to the president`s thinking on Iran as any Democrat could get. And today, the president announced new sanctions on Iran. "The New York Times" reports that the new sanctions are aimed at preventing some top Iranian officials from using the international banking system or any financial vehicles set up by European nations or other countries. But the Iranian officials likely do not keep substantial assets in international banks, if any at all, or use those institutions for transactions and any additional pressure from the new sanctions is likely to be minimal. Joining our discussion now, Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Congressman Adam Smith of Washington. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for joining us tonight. I really appreciate it. I`d like to start with Iran and the meeting you were in at the White House before the president went through this series of decisions, and you tell us, was it before he decided to order the strike and then stand down from the strike? Where was that meeting in the sequence of events?
REP. ADAM SMITH (D-WA): It was right before. It was the day before all of the events that we read so much about. It was interesting, during the discussion it was obvious the president was wrestling with what the right thing to do was. I think it was equally obvious that Vice President Pence, national security adviser Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo wanted the strike. Now, the president, we had a very long discussion about what would the right response be, and a number of us, mostly Democrats pointed out, you don`t know where this is going to go. If you bomb Iran, they`re going to respond, and then you stumble into that open conflict that he`s claimed he doesn`t want to stumble in. And to the president`s credit on this point, he seemed responsive to that message and genuinely worried about what would happen if they did launch a military strike.
O`DONNELL: So in this discussion, was it obvious to you that he the president had already been presented with all the possible collateral damage from the options that had been presented to him?
SMITH: It`s hard to imagine that he wasn`t. What was said to us by him and a number of others is DOD has presented them with options for months. It wasn`t hard to participate given the sanctions placed on Iran, given the maximum pressure campaign that Iran would do something like this. So, these options had been put in from of the president for quite sometime. Now, you know, did they give him a precise number on the strike, how many people will be destroyed (ph), probably not, but there`s no way he didn`t know from the get-go that we`re talking north of 100 people who would likely be killed in this kind of a strike.
O`DONNELL: Now, the president, when he was explaining why he changed his mind, claimed that he just discovered that it was not what we call a proportional response. It would involve killing 150 people and the Iranian strike didn`t kill anyone. And, of course, there was no one we`ve encountered that doesn`t believe he wasn`t presented with that information before that. But what he said to Chuck Todd since then, for example, is something that suggests a possibly wildly disproportionate response. He said to Chuck Todd, I`m not looking for war, and if there is, it will be obliteration like you`ve never seen before. And so, Mr. Chairman, it doesn`t seem that Donald Trump has the vaguest idea of what proportional response means.
SMITH: No, and more concerning, and I`ve asked this many times of the administration, what`s the plan? OK, they`ve got a maximum pressure campaign, and what the president led us to believe at this meeting was it`s all about stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Now, if that was the case, why did he pull out of the agreement that was stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? Well, part of it is when the president was speaking to us, he said some things about the JCPOA, the agreement to stop Iran, that simply weren`t accurate. But if that`s the case, what do we expect Iran to do in answer to this pressure campaign? And what the administration expects is Iran basically to say, OK, you got us, we`ll do what you want. But that`s not going to happen. When that doesn`t happen, when they respond the way anyone could have predicted, which is what they`re doing, then what? What`s the plan? What are you trying to drive Iran to the negotiating table to accomplish, and how do you think you get there? I think it`s kind of clear they don`t really have a plan for that, and what I`m really worried about is there`s people around the president who really want regime change. That`s what they`re pushing for, so they`re willing to take on a lot more pain and a lot more risk than the president is. And how does that play? As we saw, within 10 to 15 minutes, if we take the president at his word from stumbling into a rather nasty conflict.
O`DONNELL: Mr. Chairman, let me ask you about impeachment. You are chairman of the Armed Services Committee, you are an ally of Nancy Pelosi`s. When you came to the decision to support impeachment proceedings, did you check with the speaker on that?
SMITH: I did not. I think we, as all individual members of Congress, have to make our decision. There is a couple pieces. I mean, certainly there is a mountain of evidence at this point that the president has done things that are deeply troubling. Now, there is no specific words on what an impeachable offense is. You know, high crimes and misdemeanors on open to interpretation, so I think it is up to Congress and the American people to decide what constitutes grounds for removing a president from office. But the biggest thing for me at this point is I think we need to focus our investigations. We`re investigating a lot of different things. I think an impeachment inquiry gives us the opportunity to say, we`re investigating to see if this president should be removed from office. Let`s focus on that, figure out what the grounds of impeachment are, how many counts of impeachment we want to put forward so we can begin to clarify it for the American people. I mean, part of the problem is there are so many scandals, so many things going on on a daily basis, but when you`re talking about impeachment, we need to be clear about what actions it is that we are pursuing. So, I think we need to narrow the focus and say, what are we looking at? What exactly do we think rises to the level of impeachment or not? I think it`s time to focus that investigation.
O`DONNELL: And, Mr. Chairman, I want to turn your attention to the southern border and the children that are being held there. We`re going to be joined later in this hour by a lawyer who has been inside, seen them, met with -- including infants in her last visit, saying it`s the worst conditions she has ever seen children held in custody. What`s your reaction to what the president has been saying about this, that he could solve it but the Democrats don`t let him solve it?
SMITH: The president created this crisis to begin with. And he created it with a zero tolerance policy. If he really cared about taking care of the migrants on the border, many of them, as you`ve pointed out, children. Look, he declared an emergency and found $6 billion in the Pentagon to start building his wall. He could easily find the money to provide better facilities and better care for these migrants and start working on a strategy so that they don`t feel the need to come. But he`s not doing that. And just today, we have a bill coming up in the House that would fund more care for the migrants coming in -- facilities for them to live in, food, clothing, shelter. He issued a veto threat, because at the end of the day, that`s not his objective. His objective is not to take care of these people. His objective is a rabidly anti-immigrant policy. He wants, as he`s said on more than one occasion, a maximum pressure campaign on the migrants just like he has in Iran, I guess, to deter them from coming. In more than one occasion, you know, you had the Attorney General Sessions saying, we want them to suffer so they don`t want to come. There are the tools there for a bipartisan solution. The suffering here is unimaginable. We ought to -- whatever our feelings are about immigration, that`s a separate debate. The debate right now is how do we get the money down there to properly care for these migrants who are in such horrific conditions. We`re prepared to do it. We`re going to pass a bill this week. We support it, but the president doesn`t want to take the money to do that. He wants to use the money for other purposes, and that`s the problem.
O`DONNELL: Congressman Adam Smith, thank you very much for joining us. I really appreciate it.
SMITH: Thanks. Appreciate the chance.
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