MSNBC "All in with Chris Hayes" - Transcript: "The Dam is broken: Impeachment is on the way."
Interview
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HAYES: All right, Mike Debonis on Capitol Hill, thank you very much. We saw the proverbial dam breaking in the House, that torrent of about 40 members coming forth. Now we`re seeing very clear calls for impeachment in the Senate which is a quite new development. One of those people is someone who has some special insight into all this. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut put out a statement today arguing for the House to begin impeachment proceedings against the president. "To use America`s global credibility as a casino token, to be cashed in for personal political gain is an intolerable abuse of power and totally anathema up to the rule of law." Now, Senator Murphy sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And more than that, he has been one of the most active members in the entire U.S. Senate on U.S.-Ukraine relations. He`s traveled there multiple times and in fact, was just there a few weeks ago where he met with the new incoming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Senator Chris Murphy is here with me now. Let`s start with that. You were there a few weeks ago. You talked to the incoming President Zelensky. What did you hear? What did you -- what was your takeaway?
SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D-CT): Well, I started to get visits to my office and calls in the spring right after President Zelensky had been sworn in after a resounding election victory with concerns that Rudy Giuliani had begun to pressure Zelenski and his team to launch these investigations into Vice President Biden. And Zelenski who has never held elective offices before, he`s a political novice, didn`t really understand whether these were official requests from the U.S. government or whether they were requests he should ignore. And so part of the reason that I eventually made the decision to go there and see him for myself was because I thought it was important for somebody from the United States Congress to raise with him the concern about the damage that could be done to the U.S.-Ukraine relationship if he ceded to the political requests from the president instead of conducting the U.S.-Ukraine relationship through the State Department. When I raised this concern with him, this was now three weeks ago, he was very ready for my question and he assured me at the time that he had no interest in interfering in the U.S. election in 2020. That was at a time when we did not know that the president had raised these issues with him directly. So I left confident that, you know, perhaps this matter was behind us. We had to figure out why Giuliani was still at it. Now we know that he, in fact, was hearing directly from the president.
HAYES: Now there`s a parallel story that happens here which is the mystery of the stalled aide. And one of the things that`s come out I think in the reporting in the last few weeks and in some ways was kind of hiding in plain sight was this wasn`t a secret on Capitol Hill. The President blocking this aide was becoming a bigger and bigger deal to you and your colleagues.
MURPHY: Well, and it happened outside of the normal channels. From everything we heard this was a decision made very personally by the President that he had strong feelings about the need to withhold this aid from Ukraine. It surprised Republicans and Democrats when it came out and so it was inexplicable. And you know, Adam Schiff made the right point which is you know, whether or not you can actually uncover some direct evidence of a quid pro quo, it doesn`t really matter. The very fact that these two things were happening at the same time sent a clear message to the Ukrainian government that if they wanted to get right with the president, they had a surprise withdrawal of aid and a standing request from the president that they were not ceding to. It would just be common sense for the Ukrainians to come to the conclusion that if they did what the president was asking with respect to getting involved in the 2020 election, then maybe that aid would be unlocked.
HAYES: What changed -- what about this set of facts at least as the President has largely kind of stipulated to in his own weird addled and roundabout way, what about them makes you feel that impeachment -- that the very high constitutional bar of this kind of break glass provision is warranted?
MURPHY: So you know, I had not recommended impeachment as you know up until now in part because a lot of my constituents thought that if we were really litigating the past, the questions of interference in the 2016 election, maybe the 2020 election was the right place to make those decisions. Now, we`re talking about a president who is actively trying to potentially steal the upcoming election. And that if he were to continue to believe he had impunity for using his office as a means to try to interfere, and impact, and manipulate the 2020 election, then there`s no end to the ways in which he would try to aggressively manipulate others to get involved in this upcoming election. So to me, because we are now trying to protect an upcoming election, it was really important for us to draw a line in the sand to tell him that if you`re thinking of doing this through other means, we`re watching and we`re willing to take action.
HAYES: So you see this as some kind of deterrent, some restraint on the President`s behavior?
MURPHY: Yes, I think this is prophylactic in some ways. You know, whether or not you`re ultimately going to get 67 votes in the Senate, the President is now on notice that if you were going to try to use the awesome power at your disposal either through your domestic powers or through foreign policy to try -- to try to manipulate others to interfere in the 2020 election, there`s going to be consequences for that. And I think he was just getting to the point where he felt like there was no check on him. And this at least provides that notice of a real check.
HAYES: One of the -- one of the sort of most surprising moments today was that unanimous consent resolution non-binding that happened in the Senate today. You were tweeting about it others were watching it happen. Mitch McConnell could have objected because it was a unanimous consent and by definition one senator could object to it and he didn`t. It was non-binding and it recommended the whistleblower complaint be furnished to the appropriate committees in the Senate. What is your understanding of what happened today in the Senate?
MURPHY: You know, it was surprising to me in part because I had spent a good deal of today talking one-on-one with some of my Republican friends in the Senate. And many of them were steadfastly defending the decision to not pressure the president to bring forward the whistleblower complaints. So, privately, a lot of Senate Republicans, who are close allies of the president, were telling me that they thought that it was justified to keep the whistle-blower complaint out of the hands of congress And so it was interesting to me that there was a pivot at some point today. I mean, there was a decision by leadership to endorse the whistle-blower complaint coming before congress, and that clearly was not because there was a unanimity among Senate Republicans in making that recommendation. It may be simply because they didn`t want to make senators who are up for reelection in 2020 answer for their caucus`s participation in a cover-up, maybe it`s because they know whats in that whistle-blower complaint and they didn`t want to be seen as trying to keep it from congress. But clearly there was a change in strategy at some point today by Senate Republicans.
HAYES: All right, Senator Chris Murphy, thank you so much for being here for that.
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