CNN "Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees" - Transcript: "Interview with Sen. Chris Murphy"

Interview

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COOPER: Yes, Jim Acosta, thanks very much. Appreciate it.

Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, met with Ukraine's president shortly before the transcript of the phone conversation with President Trump came out. He joins us.

Thanks for being with us, Senator.

First of all, I just want to ask you about Jim Acosta's reporting. I'm wondering what your assessment of the vice president's involvement is here. He -- I believe he met with the Zelensky. He's clearly tried to stay out of the fray.

Do you -- it -- do you have any sense of what his involvement may be?

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D-CT): Well, if your reporting is correct, it's extraordinary the vice president has chosen to skip town over the course of the next few weeks to stay out of this story. I think it may also be a little bit of reconstruction of history to suggest the vice president is the one that persuaded the president to release the aid. The president released the aid right after the whistleblower complaint was lodged, shortly before the appropriations committee was going to require that the next year's aid be spent.

But, remember, everyone in Trump's orbit knew what was going on dating back to May. In May, Rudy Giuliani was openly bragging about going to Ukraine to try to convince that government to interfere in the 2020 election. And so, Vice President Pence, as well as everyone else in this administration, had the opportunity starting in May to either put a stop to this or come out publicly and expose it. And none of them did it.

So, I understand that Pence and many others are going to try to wash their hands of it, are going to try to put the best potential spin on it. But all of them are implicated in this scandal because it has been ongoing for months.

COOPER: It's interesting when the president was refusing to actually answer the question that the reporter ask and then continued to re-ask -- I must say under a tremendous pressure from the president not to do that, and then told you know, to ask something to the president of Finland.

[20:10:08]

It's interesting to me that the president did not want to answer the question which was, what were you trying to get out of the president of Ukraine, what did you want them to do about the Bidens in terms of investigation?

And I'm wondering if the president didn't want to answer that because he doesn't want to have on camera himself saying essentially what he said in the transcript, which is, you know, I wanted the president of Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, to investigate Joe Biden, find out information about what I believe is corruption and, you know, about the server -- the phantom story about the server being in Ukraine and the Ukrainians behind the hacking of the DNC.

I'm wondering -- obviously, you don't know this. But it's curious to me that he didn't want to say specifically what he wanted.

MURPHY: There's no way for the president to offer an adequate explanation for what he did. He had two asks of the President Zelensky in that phone call. One was to help him destroy Hillary Clinton. The second was to help him destroy Vice President Biden.

You cannot do that as the president of the United States. You cannot use the massive power entrusted to you to destroy your political opponents. And what we know is that the effort was broader than just that phone call. In fact, for months, the State Department itself and the president's personal lawyer were involved in this effort as well.

And so, the president is not going to be able to offer an adequate explanation for the corruption that he engaged in in that phone call or that the rest of his team has been engaged in for months.

COOPER: You know, initially, a lot of the president's defenders were saying, look, you know, this whistleblower doesn't have direct knowledge, it's all hearsay. And then everything the whistleblower said essentially is proven within a matter of days. And the White House releases the transcript. It's what the whistleblower said. Everything basically the whistle-blower said has turned out to be accurate.

I'm wondering, the argument now from a lot of Trump supporters seems to be, well, there was no quid pro quo quoted in the conversation and it was a, quote, totally normal conversation to have between world leaders. Is there -- just because there is no you give me this I will give you that, the sword hanging over the president of the Ukraine is the need for military aid for an active conflict against Russia. I'm wondering, do you believe there's any validity to the argument there was no quid pro quo because it wasn't in the conversation?

Also, the argument, the other argument is the president of the Ukraine has said, oh, I wasn't under pressure. I don't put much stock in that given he may have to continue to have a relationship with President Trump moving forward.

MURPHY: Well, of course. You listen to him at the U.N. and you read the transcript of his remarks. And you can see him bending over backwards to get along with this president. Why? Because Ukraine is totally dependent right now on the United States for their security.

Without the United States, they would have to be back under the thumb of the Russians. And there is an implicit threat, there's an implicit quid pro quo in every single demand that the United States makes of Ukraine. The president doesn't need to say it out loud. There are consequences if you don't do what the United States wants.

But if you read deeper into that transcript, it does actually seem as if there's a quid pro quo in the way that Trump is talking to Zelensky. He says, oh, we do a lot for Ukraine. We don't get a lot in return.

I have these two asks of you. Help me destroy Hillary Clinton. Help me destroy Vice President Biden.

If you are Zelensky in the other end of that phone call, with zero leverage over the president of the country that essentially keeps you independent and sovereign, of course, you are going to do what the president wants. Of course, you are going to come to the conclusion that the president is going to hold you accountable. And, of course, we know that the president did suspend the aid.

And so, whether or not there was an explicit quid pro quo, people in Ukraine could easily come to the conclusion that you didn't do what the president wanted and you paid a consequence.

COOPER: Lastly, you continue to be focused on getting gun safety legislation passed. The president has indicated impeachment will be a big hurdle. Of course, you know, he also, even before the impeachment, clearly had backed off the talk he had immediately after the latest mass killings, which echoed what he had said in previous mass killings, that he would be looking toward, you know, significant, some sort of legislation. All that seems pretty much to be gone from the president's vocabulary.

And now, he is blaming the impeachment, saying they wonder why they don't get gun legislation done. Then they wonder why they don't get drug prices lowered because all they do is talk nonsense, end quote.

[20:15:04]

Do you worry that substantive legislative action on guns is as far as the White House is concerned off the table?

MURPHY: Well, if we don't get a background check deal done, it's only because the president decided to walk away from the table. I'm wearing my anti-gun violence t-shirt today as I'm talking to you because we had nine Democratic presidential candidates here in Las Vegas talking about their bold plans for action.

And on the day that I announced my support for an impeachment inquiry, the White House reached out to me and said, hey, you know, we still want to stay at the table. We'll see if that's true.

But I have been very open that I believe that Congress needs to pursue impeachment at the same time as we pursue a legislative agenda. So, I will be sitting at the table waiting for the president to engage on a background checks measure. I will not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I want universal background checks but I will settle for something less if the president is willing to come and talk to us. But it has been two full weeks since the last time we had substantive engagement from the White House on background checks. I will be waiting for as long as it takes to get this done, because we can't let a chance to save lives be stalled by impeachment.

COOPER: Senator Murphy, I appreciate your time. Thank you very much.

MURPHY: Thanks. Yes.

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