MSNBC "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" - Transcript: "WAPO: Trump involved Pence."

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

O`DONNELL: And joining our discussion now is Democratic Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut. He`s on the Foreign Relations Committee and the Appropriations Committee. He joins us from Las Vegas where he has been attending a gun safety forum today. Senator, thank you very much for joining us on this important night. We really appreciate it.

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D-CT): Thanks for having me.

O`DONNELL: I want to get your reaction to the secretary of state finally saying, after a week of pretending otherwise, that, yes, he was on the phone call.

MURPHY: Well, the secretary of state, you know, clearly should have disclosed this prior to today. He knew it was eventually going to come out. But, of course, the secretary of state has been read into this campaign of corruption for months now. Rudy Giuliani was openly bragging about his attempts to convince the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens and to relitigate the 2016 election. He apparently had been getting the help throughout from the State Department, including high-ranking officials there. And so, Mike Pompeo didn`t need to be on the July 25th phone call to understand that the Trump administration -- his Department of State and the president`s political operators -- were attempting to convince a foreign country to interfere in an American election. And I think that deserves repeating over and over again. We focus on this call, and we should because it is a transcript in which the president is engaged in a fundamental corruption. But the corruption started far before that phone call and everyone close to the president knew about it.

O`DONNELL: Now, you`re in a peculiar position possibly as a senator here because as a senator, you will be one of the 100 jurors in an impeachment trial of the president if the house impeaches him and sends him to trial in the senate. You might also be a witness since you had your own meeting in Ukraine with the president of Ukraine and other Ukrainian officials. What would you be able to tell the Senate about your sense of what kind of pressure Ukraine was feeling from the president?

MURPHY: Well, I`ve been involved in U.S.-Ukraine relationship for a long time. I was there three different times during the protest of 2013 and 2014. So I`ve paid attention to this relationship, you know, going back six years. I had begun to hear in the spring of this year about Giuliani`s overtures to the Ukrainian government. I was hearing, not surprisingly, this new novice President Zelensky really didn`t understand what to do with these demands he was getting from Rudy Giuliani. Were they demands from the United States government or were they demands that he could ignore? So part of the reason that I did go to Ukraine, now about three weeks ago was to make it clear to President Zelensky that if he was to deal with the U.S. Government, he should deal with the State Department, and that it was really a horrible idea for his government to get involved in an American election. Now, in that meeting, he did not raise for me the concern that his aide was being withheld because of he was unwilling to fulfill these demands. But he certainly was very concerned about the aid being withheld, and he also was very knowledgeable about the demands that were being made of him by the Trump political operation. Whether or not they were connected, of course, it would stand to reason that a new President might come to believe that the two things are connected.

O`DONNELL: And I want to get your reaction today to the President when he was asked about his - his attacks on the whistleblower possibly endangering the life of the whistleblower? The President didn`t even respond to that. Just went on to say he thinks the whistleblower is lying about him and he thinks the whistleblower is in a conspiracy with Democrats and the House, but no concern whatsoever for the whistleblower and for the possibility that the President is endangering his life.

MURPHY: Well, and then, once again, calling for the whistleblower to be made public so the President can directly confront him or her. Listen, the President says he supports whistleblowers except for the whistleblowers that are undoing - uncovering wrongdoing in his administration. That`s not how the whistleblower law works. I think this is a really serious moment because we rely on the Whistleblower Act and these brave individuals to come forward when there is corruption happening inside an administration frankly, whether it`s a Democratic Administration or Republican Administration. And if any President can get away with these kinds of personal vitriolic attacks against whistleblowers can withhold their information from Congress, I`m not sure why people are ever going to come forward in the future? So I really need my Republican colleagues, more than just Chuck Grassley, to stand up and call out the President when he`s threatening the

life of the whistleblower, or when he`s trying to uncover it? Because we all rely on these people to keep government clean.

O`DONNELL: Senator, I want to get a quick LAST WORD from you about gun legislation. Speaker Pelosi was asked today can the Congress proceed with legislative business while also investigating the President. Any reporter who is wondering about that should look at 1973 and 1974. There was a great deal of legislating done during the Nixon impeachment process. But specifically on guns, Speaker Pelosi was asked about that today. What`s your reaction? You`re in Las Vegas on this issue tonight working on the gun issue. What do you think is possible?

MURPHY: Yes, we had all - we had nine candidates here. Bernie obviously wasn`t able to make it. It was a great forum and thanks to MSNBC for helping to participate. Listen, I`m ready to do a deal with the President on background checks. Obviously I want universal background checks, but I made it totally clear to the White House that I`m willing to negotiate a compromise. I`ve talked to the President several times personally about this. It`s been two weeks since I`ve heard from the White House substantively on this. It`s just not true for the President to say that we can`t get anything done. Right now the ball is firmly in the White House`s court when it comes to getting a background checks deal done. There is no reason why we can`t walk and chew gum at the same time? If we shut down legislatively, there are only two people to blame for that, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.

O`DONNELL: Senator Chris Murphy, thank you for joining us tonight. Really appreciate it.

MURPHY: Thanks.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source