MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript: "Prosecutors move to seize 40-foot catamaran."
Interview
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MADDOW: You might remember early on in the Trump administration the first summer he was in office, there was a bombshell leak of a number of transcripts of the president`s phone calls with foreign leaders, including the president of Australia and the leader of Mexico, including the president saying sort of embarrassing, ignorant and disparaging things both to those leaders and about those calls. A lot of scandal around the fact "The Washington Post" obtained those transcripts. They were created by White House staff. One of the changes the Trump administration made thereafter is they stopped putting note takers on calls between the president and foreign leaders. There stopped being formal and detailed readouts about what happened in those conversations. Presumably the idea they didn`t want another leak of what was going on in those calls, even if the initial leaks this been essentially people trying to let it be known how the president was behaving to foreign leaders in a way unprecedented to what we`ve seen from any previous president. Well, now, tonight, that makes it all the more remarkable "The Washington Post" has a new scoop that has just posted within the last half hour or so. That the president may have had a phone call with a foreign leader in which he made a promise that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community. This is a whistleblower complaint that has triggered a very intense showdown between the Trump administration and the Intelligence Committee in the House in particular. They`re supposed to get whistleblower complaints like this. There have been threats of subpoenas. There`s been a real standoff over this.
"The Post" is the first to report what this complaint might have been about is the president saying something very, very troubling to a foreign leader in a way that at least some in the intelligence community became aware it have and went through channels to raise a flag about what happened. Joining us now, again, on short notice, is Congressman John Garamendi, who`s the chair of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness. Mr. Garamendi, I have to tell you, every time we book you to talk about something going on in your area of expertise, something else bongo -- that is a bombshell and totally gonzo breaks in your area for expertise. So thank you for doing this for us.
REP. JOHN GARAMENDI (D-CA): Yes. Happy to be with you, Rachel. This is just astounding what`s going on here. Certainly the incident itself, whatever it might be is extremely troublesome, but it`s one more brick in the wall that the president is trying to build around himself to stonewall the Congress of the United States and the American people from things that he has done as president and before he became president. In his own words, he said under no circumstances will his people ever comply with a subpoena. Well, here we go one more step on that. And this could be extraordinarily important because there are things at play right now that may very well have been the promise. One of which I`ve been dealing with as chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
MADDOW: When you say the promise, we don`t know in terms of what "The Washington Post" is reporting here, right?
GARAMENDI: That`s correct.
MADDOW: "The Washington Post" says it`s -- Trump`s interaction with the foreign leader included a promise that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official to file this formal whistleblower complaint. One former official telling "The Times" that the communication was on a phone call. We know the whistleblower complaint was filed in August, August 12th. So, that narrows it down in terms of what communication it might have been.
GARAMENDI: Right.
MADDOW: I have to say, just thinking about this from a process standpoint, if this was the worst case scenario, if this is something that the worst thing we could possibly imagine, what else is this whistleblower supposed to do besides go through this process that the Trump administration is still bottling up?
GARAMENDI: Well, apparently, the law is absolutely clear. The information has to be made available to the intelligence community, the Gang of Eight. But I`ve got to tell you, I`m worried about the promise if there was one and if it was the president. If he was talking to Putin one month after that August 12th period of time, the president removed $770 million from the European Deterrence Initiative which is specifically money to push back on Russia`s incursion into Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. God help us if that was what the discussion was about. But it is troubling -- it is troubling when you start stacking all of these things up. $5 billion out of the coffers and the work the military does to build his border wall. It was nice he went down and signed that steel post. But that happened to have been a fence that was already in place before he ever got there, before he ever became president. It`s one thing after another. This administration, its stonewalling, its refusal to be held to account, it just -- is beyond anything that anyone has ever seen in the history of this nation.
MADDOW: Do you have confidence, sir, especially given your role in oversight of the U.S. military, do you have confidence in the military? Do you have confidence in the inspector general`s system so that when the most egregious things happen, that the supposedly legally protected channels for people letting us being -- letting it be known what`s happening and why, that those channels will be held open, or do you think that the system is failing?
GARAMENDI: I think there`s an entire attitude of laxity with regard to activities, proper activities. It begins at the White House. The leader is clearly corrupt. There`s no other way to describe it. The leader is clearly a liar. A leader has no use for the truth and will say anything at any time that advances his particular interest at that moment. And so, that tends to sift down through the entire administration. You gave a long dissertation just in the early part of this hour about what`s going on in FEMA and the tragedy in Puerto Rico as a result of the corruption, as a result of the laxity to laws and just ignoring the normal correctness that ought to occur at every level. The military is outstanding. These are all very, very good people. But when the top makes it clear that they welcome -- the president when he welcomes on to his property literally millions of dollars of taxpayer money to support him at Mar-a-Lago and at his other resorts, it doesn`t surprise me that all across, in this case the military, that they see, well, why don`t we go ahead and book some rooms at the resort at Turnberry in Scotland? It`s just -- this whole thing is just a corrupt administration. It sifts down. I don`t believe there was any intentional wrongdoing on the part of the military. But the laxity of standard, it`s endemic in so many places. And as representatives of the people of America, the 535 of us in the House and in the Senate, we have the obligation to hold the administration accountable, to uncover the deflects, to uncover the fraud, the corruption, and to let the American people know there is three branches of government, and the administration cannot do anything it pleases to do even though it apparently has courts now that will let it do it. But we`re still the representatives of the people and we have an obligation here to investigate and to let the public, our constituents, the American people, know what`s going on.
MADDOW: California Congressman John Garamendi of the House Armed Services Committee, the chair of the Subcommittee on Readiness, sir, I appreciate your time tonight. Thank you for being here.
GARAMENDI: Sure.
MADDOW: And for always be a harbinger of breaking news. I really appreciate it.
GARAMENDI: Take care.
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