MSNBC "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" - Transcript

Interview

MSNBC "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" - Transcript

MSNBC "COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN" INTERVIEW WITH HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI (D-CA) INTERVIEWER: KEITH OLBERMANN

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MR. OLBERMANN: I'm joined now by the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Her book, "Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters," is now out in paperback.

It's a great pleasure to have you here, Madame Speaker.

SPEAKER PELOSI: My pleasure to be here.

MR. OLBERMANN: The Pentagon first. If Secretary Gates's budget has less hardware in it, less stuff, are the Republicans in any sense right that this constitutes a defense cut of some sort?

SPEAKER PELOSI: No. What this is, it's a recognition of the threat. When you look at a budget and you look at the priorities in it, the defense budget, you say, "What is the mission?" And Secretary Gates, I think, is accurately reflecting the mission, what the threats are to us. We're no longer in a bipolar world, and some of the weapon systems are geared toward that. Now they won't be.

I salute him for his courage in putting this forward. And isn't it interesting that Secretary Gates was the secretary of Defense under President Bush?

MR. OLBERMANN: And now he's an evil person from the GOP spin point of view.

Do you think -- we've heard pretty much all year things like this from the GOP. Has it finally found its voice -- I mean, sort of hysterical, factually inaccurate umbrage, or in this case mathematically inaccurate umbrage?

SPEAKER PELOSI: I think it's desperation. I really do think it's desperation to a certain extent that a senator would criticize the president while he is -- while he, the senator, is on foreign soil; it appears to be he was at a military base and saying the president is gutting the military budget and that others here were criticizing the president when he was overseas on a foreign policy issue.

The budget, that's fair game. That's domestic. We can criticize at home on that. But they're resorting to levels of desperation that I think show the bankruptcy of their ideas. If these weapon systems are so great, they should be able to defend them on the merit.

MR. OLBERMANN: Right. But, I mean, factually speaking, just in terms of real easy-to-understand math, we're going to spend more in 2010 than we did under George Bush in 2009, fiscal 2009, on the Pentagon, correct?

SPEAKER PELOSI: Correct. And I always recall President Eisenhower warning of the military-industrial complex. The power of the weapons manufacturers is very -- it's powerful in Washington, D.C. And as I said, this took great courage. But our first responsibility is to protect the American people. That's the oath we take, to protect and defend the Constitution and the American people. And it is the responsibility of the president to take the lead on that, and the secretary of Defense is more accurately reflecting the current state of play of what the threat is, what the mission is, and what the priorities should be in the budget.

MR. OLBERMANN: If I may switch over to the subject of this oversight panel's report card on the bailout, on the bank bailout, there seemed to be the implication in here that we're putting all of our proverbial eggs in a proverbial basket. Is there, in fact, a better way? Do you like the idea that perhaps we have to weed out the more troubled banks rather than continue to throw money at them?

SPEAKER PELOSI: Well, I think that is so. I don't think anybody wants to continue to give life support to institutions that really are not viable, whether it's banks or auto industry or whatever the subject is. But it's unfortunate that President Bush's TARP proposal -- and this is a Bush administration proposal -- really did not go down the path that it even said it was going down. It was going to buy these assets then and there. They didn't really have a plan to do it. Then they went to capitalization, which may or may not have been a good idea. Now we're back to buying troubled assets, toxic assets. If there ever were an oxymoron, isn't that it?

MR. OLBERMANN: (Laughs.)

SPEAKER PELOSI: But I think that whatever the plan is, we have to have a plan and we have to do it. And whether or not the report that says that the administration is underestimating the depth of the problem is so or not, the point is we have to address the issue. And there may be some institutions who will benefit from this, even though we'd like them not to, but we have to do what's right for the economy.

MR. OLBERMANN: When blow-back occurs again from the other side -- and we've heard when changes were made at the head of GM, that how dare the government interfere with who's running these companies that we basically have kept alive -- there seems to be a knee-jerk response to almost everything from the GOP now.

SPEAKER PELOSI: That's right.

MR. OLBERMANN: It's just gain-saying, just contrariness. Seventy-eight days into this administration and the nickname "the party of no" has really sort of stuck to the Republicans with good merit. Is there any indication that this isn't what the next four years are going to look like?

SPEAKER PELOSI: I don't think they will. I do think that because of the bankruptcy of their ideas, they have nothing that appeals to the American people. In fact, the American people rejected their policies of the last eight years, or longer in terms of Congress.

But I do think, when it comes to education, health care and energy, which are the three priorities that the president has in his budget that we passed in the House and in the Senate, that there will be some level of cooperation. We certainly hope so, because we want -- these are big issues; we want as much bipartisanship as possible.

But at the end of the day, we're going to pass a bill, and we're not just going to wait around for bipartisanship. Hopefully they will be there with their ideas that we can incorporate, but we won't water down our initiatives -- for example, health care -- to a point of the lowest common denominator. We want the best possible, boldest initiative we can, with strong bipartisanship. So we'll just have to go forward. The American people don't want to hear about process. They want health care.

MR. OLBERMANN: Well, all right, to a subject where process has come into our rights and our securities and what's left over of the erosion of them from the previous administration, the attorney general's pronouncements on the state secrets cases, which not only defended Mr. Bush's wiretaps but says, now that the Patriot Act provides sovereign immunity -- if I have been spied upon illegally, our attorney general's office, our Justice Department, is saying I can't sue because of what the Patriot Act says.

How can this president possibly stand behind that point of view?

SPEAKER PELOSI: Well, the Patriot Act -- the amendments to the Patriot Act -- we sunsetted part of it -- will expire by December of this year. So we will have an opportunity to address this in the consideration of the Patriot Act, because sovereign immunity -- you went into it so well last night; I won't dare try to present the clarity that you did -- but it shouldn't be that way.

And my credentials going into the speaker's office and the leadership have been one of a long time on Intelligence and trying to protect the civil liberties of the American people. So wherever -- I know that the White House wants to protect the (provenance ?) of the presidency, the executive branch. We want to -- in the legislative branch, we all have a responsibility to the Constitution.

So I'm sure we will come to some good place on this, because I trust Barack Obama and because I think the situation, the position of the Bush administration, was so egregious that it just doesn't hold up in the light of day.

MR. OLBERMANN: But, of course, he campaigned on the premise that the domestic spying done during the Bush administration, to whatever degree it was done, was wrong. If we don't come to a better place, or if you and he and the other branches of the party and the administration don't come to a better place, isn't he now just flatly wrong on this?

SPEAKER PELOSI: Well, you know, this can go to court --

MR. OLBERMANN: Yeah.

SPEAKER PELOSI: -- and the courts can decide. But you cannot say that your rights have not been violated if we don't disclose the information, but it's okay for us to find it out, as you so clearly presented. We'll have hearings in the Congress. We'll review the Patriot Act, the administration, in terms of state secrets privilege, another concern that we have. The Justice Department is reviewing that. What has been said already is not necessarily the last word from the administration.

And so we have a number -- and we've had our contempt of Congress initiatives that the administration, I think, did the right thing. And so I have confidence in them. And the fact is that we have the inspector general's reports, which I think are due in June -- I don't know, early or late June -- on the -- which I say inspectors general for not only the NSA but other agencies of government, which will show us, reveal to us, a great deal more than we might find out in court about what went wrong. And we can never have a repetition of what was done under the Bush administration or a continuation of that.

MR. OLBERMANN: And widening that out to other aspects of that administration, where do you stand and where do you think we're going to wind up in terms of investigating the entire process of Guantanamo Bay, rendition, all of the, if you will, horrors of that administration?

SPEAKER PELOSI: Well, the administration has said we are closing Guantanamo. We know that, and they're in the process of doing that. They have said that the United States does not torture. And so, you know, it's such a silly discussion, in my view, because torture has never really produced the results that we want.

MR. OLBERMANN: Right.

SPEAKER PELOSI: So the argument that people use, "Would you torture somebody if you knew they had the answer to this or that?" it's a hard question, because people would ordinarily say, "Well, I'd do anything to protect the American people." But the fact is that unsubstantiated information coming from torture can make matters worse.

MR. OLBERMANN: As we saw with Zubaydah, apparently.

SPEAKER PELOSI: Exactly. And so we have to protect the American people. And it always has been the case from the beginning of our country, from our origins -- liberty and security. We must have both freedom and security.

MR. OLBERMANN: Well, clearly they have done what is needed to be done in terms of going forward in the Obama administration.

SPEAKER PELOSI: Yes.

MR. OLBERMANN: But I've made the point a couple of times that it seems to me every time something has gone wrong in the country, stopping it is the first priority, but to truly eradicate it, you have to go back and, you know, clean out the stables. Isn't it necessary to correct, to what degree we can, the past rather than just saying we're not going to do this again?

SPEAKER PELOSI: Well, we have a little bit of difference of opinion between the White House and the Congress.

MR. OLBERMANN: (Laughs.)

SPEAKER PELOSI: (Laughs.) The White House wants to go forward, and that's appropriate for them. We believe that we have to take a look at what happened. There may be criminal activity. We ended up going to court on the contempt, but the administration would not prosecute a criminal case so we had to go with a civil case. But there has to be some way for the truth to be known, A, and B, acted upon if people are engaged in illegal activity.

And hopefully we'll learn a great deal more from the inspectors general when they have their reports in June on the subject. It's very, very important. But I have confidence in Barack Obama, constitutional -- he taught it. He practiced it. He's passed laws, and now he's the executive, the president of the United States. What do we call that, the enforcer? (Laughs.)

MR. OLBERMANN: Constitutionalist in chief, I suppose.

The speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, whose book, "Know Your Power," is now available in paperback. Madame Speaker, a great pleasure to have you here. Thank you for so much of your time tonight.

SPEAKER PELOSI: I appreciate that. And I want young women to be involved in politics, and so I want them to read my book.

And my condolences to you on the loss of your mother. She sounds like a woman who truly knew her power.

MR. OLBERMANN: I believe she did. Again, thank you for coming in.

END.

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