CNN "Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Jim Himes

Interview

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Joining us now, a lawmaker who was in on the briefing that apparently cost the acting DNI his job. He's Connecticut congressman, Democratic Congressman Jim Himes.

Congressman, you see the president calling his -- this assessment from his own intelligence officials a disinformation campaign. I know there's a lot you can't say, but how do his comments square with what you have been told about the facts?

REP. JIM HIMES (D-CT): Yes, well, Anderson, I can't talk about what was said behind closed doors. There's, obviously, a lot of media reports out there.

I can certainly say, you know, the way the president articulated it, blaming the Democrats for another hoax -- again, I can't confirm who said what, but I can promise you that the Democrats aren't saying anything here. You got a bunch of news reports about what might -- what might have been said in that -- in that meeting.

But, look, we should unpack that a little bit, right? What was or wasn't said in that meeting isn't all that important. And we can come back to that.

We can talk about why the Russians might have an interest in Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. It's not about them as individuals. It's about creating schisms, about creating divisions in our body politic.

But what's really important is what you were talking about there. That the president in the Oval Office, and I obviously wasn't there, may have berated his chief intelligence official for telling him something he didn't want to hear and, Anderson, we've seen this movie before, when presidents or when people in power want the intelligence community to say something.

We saw it under the Bush administration in which the CIA and George Tenet, the director of the CIA, famously characterized the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a slam dunk, because that's what the vice president, Dick Cheney, and the president wanted to hear. And there are thousands of Americans and many hundreds of thousands of people who paid with their lives for that bastardization of intelligence.

So, that's really the concerning thing about this story.

COOPER: There is reporting that Republicans on the committee challenged the conclusions from intelligence officials. That would obviously be consistent with the interference that some of them have run for the president since he took office.

How seriously do you believe House Republicans are taking this?

HIMES: Well, you know, it's a -- it's serious thing for them, right? You know, we saw in the impeachment proceeding how all of the Republicans in the House and almost all the Republicans in the Senate are cowed by this president. They need to do what this president wants them to do or they lose their jobs. That's the dynamic on Capitol Hill right now.

Many of these folks are good people who behind closed doors express some -- a lot of concern about what the president does. But they know that if they step out the way Mitt Romney does, they will be treated by the president and by conservative organizations the way Mitt Romney was -- was treated.

So, but, again, this really isn't about Donald Trump. This isn't about Bernie Sanders. This is about the fact, I believe, to the core of my being that the Russians are going to try to do exactly what they did in 2016 again in 2020, and why wouldn't they? The president of the United States didn't hold them accountable for it.

You know, there's really never been any accountability other than a few indictments, other than the intelligence community sort of showing that we know what happened and the president then denying it. There's really never been accountability for the Russians for what they did in 2016.

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COOPER: Yes, and doing it again apparently.

Congressman Himes, appreciate it. Thank you.

HIMES: Thank you, Anderson.

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