MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Adam Schiff

Interview

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Joining us now is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, the author of "Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Democracy and Still Could", California Congressman Adam Schiff, chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

Mr. Chairman, thank you for being here. Congratulations on this book.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA): No, thank you, and thank you for the beautiful description of it.

MADDOW: I was struck by sort of learning about how you learned in this. It seems like you were sort of -- you were built backwards in time to be ready to be the chairman of the Intelligence Committee at a time that there were questions about a president being compromised by Russia given your background and having been a prosecutor and involved in these things and having lived and -- lived in and visited the former Soviet Union. It does sort of feel like you`re either star crossed or district end for this, doesn`t it?

SCHIFF: Well, it did feel at times like certain parts of my life prepared me for what was to come in very unexpected ways. I never thought I would see another illustration of Russian tradecraft at work like I did in the Miller case. But the president in so many ways resembled a kind of target Miller was.

He was a philanderer. He had poor morals and a lack of ethics. He had the same greed except on a far greater scale than Miller. And, you know, unlike Miller where the Russians could, you know, dangle gold, Donald Trump was actively pursuing this very lucrative project in Moscow. The Russians didn`t need to dangle anything. He was pursuing it proactively himself.

And to realize that the president was, you know, as vulnerable a target as Richard Miller and was, you know, quite a shocking revelation. But certainly seeing that kind of trade craft in the past, recognizing how the Russians worked, how, you know, they do their psychological operations, how they study the psychology of their target and know how to manipulate people, it seemed quite familiar.

MADDOW: When you write in the book about what was going on in the 2016 campaign, you have a vivid anecdote about you and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California speaking on the phone. She`s saying, are you seeing what I`m seeing, in terms of what Russia was doing to help the Trump campaign and the way that Trump appeared to be towing the Kremlin line on even controversial things that otherwise didn`t matter to U.S. politics in a way that was understandable.

It did feel like -- and you did try to sound the alarm, now that alarm has been widely sounded, the Mueller investigation, I want to talk more about in a minute, the impeachment saga, the entire drama of the Trump -- of Trump`s one term in office is now laid bare before us, and it does seem like the Republican Party would be happy to put him back in the oval office despite everything that we learned about him. That to me is sort of soul sucking. You remain sort of optimistic that we can get past that and Republicans can change despite what you`re seeing from them right now about their willingness to buy this stuff.

SCHIFF: You know, I do remain optimistic. And just as -- and I keep coming back to something that Robert Caro once said in an interview, that power doesn`t corrupt as much as it reveals. It doesn`t always reveal for our best, but it reveals.

And for every story of it revealing in people a willingness to sacrifice everything they claim to believe in, their ideology, all of the endless capitulation to this immoral president we saw by so many Republicans in Congress and so many people in the Trump administration, for every story like that, I also got to meet people like Marie Yovanovitch. This courageous ambassador of ours being threatened out of her post in Ukraine, who has the courage to stand up to the most powerful man in the country, to step into this hearing room when the president was telling her not to, to stare down, you know, this phalanx of Trump acolytes vilifying her and who paved the way for others to show courage. The Alexander Vindmans and Fiona Hills and so many others in large ways and small, when I see those stories, which I love to write about, it vindicates the founders` belief that we possess sufficient virtue to be self-governing, that we don`t need a tyrant ruling over us.

So, I am optimistic. We will get through this. We are a resilient country. What we do now will determine how quickly we get through this.

[21:35:00]

MADDOW: Let me ask you about that short portion of the book that I just read moments ago about your sort of revelation about Robert Mueller. Mueller -- having led the Mueller investigation into what Russia did and whether the Trump campaign was deliberately colluding with Russian government`s actions on Trump`s behalf. And then you write with incredible clarity about how angered and disgusted and dismayed you were about how William Barr handled the receipt of that report and his misleading rollout of it to the public.

But you were shocked that Robert Mueller effectively wasn`t going to make a good witness, that he was not the person who you had expected to be testifying there, that he had changed since you had last seen him in public. Do you believe, looking back on it, that Mueller shouldn`t have led that inquiry, it should have been somebody else, or is your regret only that somebody else should have testified about the content of the report?

SCHIFF: My regret only is in forcing him to testify when I could understand the moment he did, why his staff had been so reluctant. He wasn`t able to bring the report really fully to life. He just wasn`t the same man that I knew from years earlier. And that`s my regret, is forcing him to testify that way. I think he led a brilliant investigation. I think he is a man of just incredible integrity.

The one thing that really strikes me, too, and you mentioned Bill Barr, is in very much the same way that Donald Trump imagined -- imagines everyone is like him, everyone lies like he does, everyone is corrupt like he is, I think that Bob Mueller, being this man of unquestioned integrity, also presumes of others that they share the same devotion to the truth and have the same rectitude, and I think he must have been astonished that Bill Barr would so betray his work, would lie to the American people about what was in his report repeatedly.

And so I think you have the illustration of a really good man in Bob Mueller who presumes the best in everyone else, and then you have the exact opposite in Donald Trump.

MADDOW: The book is called "Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Democracy and Still Could", with remarkable anecdotes about Kevin McCarthy and why Congressman Schiff`s telling, he absolutely should be nowhere sneer the speakership of the United States House. Remarkable anecdotes about Lindsey Graham, remarkable anecdotes about Devin Nunes, about a lot of his Democratic colleagues.

Congressman Schiff, this is -- politicians don`t write great books, but this was a fascinating read. This is an exception to the politicians don`t write good books rule. This is a good one. Thank you for doing it.

SCHIFF: Thanks. I`m glad I could break the mold.

MADDOW: Indeed, in many way.

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