MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky joins us now. She‘s chair of the House Intelligence Sub-committee on Oversight and Investigations. Congresswoman Schakowsky, thanks very much for coming back on the show.

REP. JAN SCHAKOWSKY (D), ILLINOIS: Hi, Rachel. Thank you.

MADDOW: First, I want to ask you about the status of the investigation. I know you‘re looking into five specific cases where it seems like the intelligence agencies were not briefing you or were being deliberately misleading to Congress, but only four of those cases are public. Is that right?

SCHAKOWSKY: That‘s correct. We have the - the shoot down of a plane over Peru; we‘ve got the June 24th announcement by Leon Panetta that there were over eight years he was not told about when he came in an eight year old program that should have been - been briefed into; detainee interrogations and the destruction of tapes, and - and one more.

And the National Security Act of 1947 says that we are supposed to be fully and currently informed about the activities and we want to set it straight now if we have to change the law, if we have to change procedures, but we want to make sure that this does not happen in the future under any president.

MADDOW: I didn‘t - I didn‘t mean to be hyperbolic when I said that this is a bit of an existential crisis for the US government. I do actually see it that way. The idea that there would be portions of our government that are highly funded, secret by design and not telling other portions of the government what they‘re doing, the ones that are legally empowered to know, to me is a scary thing about what America means. It‘s a - it‘s a very big picture question.

SCHAKOWSKY: Absolutely. And I feel that so heavily on my shoulders, because the members of the Intelligence Committee in many ways just serve not only as the Congress, but at the - as the eyes and ears of the people of the United States. We‘re the ones that are supposed to know about these secrets, and not just simply be told about it, not just notified, but actually informed so that there can be conversations. And we want to have the Intelligence Committee understand that we can be a partner. Maybe we could actually offer something that would prevent us from get into some kind of a national security crisis.

MADDOW: Especially because the actions of the intelligence agencies, if there is blowback for those actions, especially when they‘re controversial actions taken, which tends to happen with secret programs, that blowback affects all Americans everywhere. It affects us as a nation, not just the people who carried out those actions in the first place.

SCHAKOWSKY: That‘s exactly right, and, all too often, we find on the Intelligence Committee that we hear about it on a news show or, you know, on the - on the radio, and we come to committee and we say, well, how come we weren‘t briefed on that? And often some agency official come and say, oh, mea culpa. We were supposed to do that. But it‘s not good enough to ask forgiveness. We want them to come and share this with us beforehand, and we want to make sure that the policies are in place that require that.

MADDOW: Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, who has a hard job but has enthusiasm for it. I‘m very happy to hear it. Thanks for joining us tonight.

SCHAKOWSKY: Thank you so much, Rachel.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source