CNN "State of the Union with Jake Tapper" - Interview with Ron Johnson

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Senator, thanks for joining us. I hope you're well and healthy.

I want to have you take a look at these images that we're seeing out of Wisconsin, with residents flooding bars after the stay-at-home order was overturned.

I think everyone agrees we need to find a way for the country to reopen and stop the economic suffering. But health experts say that this must be done in a way that keeps people safe and ultimately prevents potentially more death and health issues and more economic suffering.

What do you think when you see these packed bars, in violation of CDC guidelines, in your home state?

SEN. RON JOHNSON (R-WI): Well, I certainly see a small subset of Wisconsinites celebrating a little freedom. We have all been pent up. We have all been frustrated. And so I think they took that occasion.

But what I see in Wisconsin is primarily people being very responsible, wearing masks in grocery stores, maintaining the social distancing, taking this disease as seriously as it really needs to be taken.

So, yes, I realize those are -- those are images. They concern probably all of us. But, again, we do need to move to keep as much as our economy open as possible, but open it up safely and responsibly. TAPPER: I want to talk about inspectors general, before we get to the

unmasking memo.

When President Obama was in office, you and I would talk a lot about inspectors general. President Trump has now gotten rid of four inspectors general, in one capacity or another, including on Friday the State Department inspector general.

Senator Romney called this -- quote -- "a threat to accountable democracy" and said it -- quote -- "chills the independence essential to their purpose."

What's your response? I remember you being a real advocate for inspector general -- inspectors general and independent inspectors general when President Obama was in office.

JOHNSON: I am an advocate for inspector generals.

And as the chairman of the general Oversight Committee of the United States Senate, we rely on an awful lot of that work.

I think their independence needs to remain within their agencies. I'm very mindful of the fact that inspector generals don't work for Congress. They actually work for the administration. They're part of the executive branch, a different co-equal branch of government. And they work and serve the president of the United States.

So, I take a slightly different view in terms of what they should be independent from. They need to retain their independence within the agencies, so they can do inspections and investigations and provide that to their leadership, but primarily to the president.

And so they serve at the president's will. And that is true of every inspector general.

The other thing I found out, Jake, is that not all inspector generals are created equal. In our oversight work, we have already had two inspector generals resign because of some of the corruption we were uncovering. They left town ahead of the posse, so to speak.

[09:45:17]

And so there are inspector generals that take -- bring a political agenda, as well as those that do a phenomenal job. So, they're not all equal. But, in the end, they serve at the pleasure of the president, and he's got the authority to hire and terminate.

TAPPER: Well, no one questions whether or not he has the authority to do so.

But I really have to say, I find it hard to believe that, if President Obama had gotten rid of four inspector generals -- inspectors general in six weeks, that you would have the same attitude that you seem to have right now.

JOHNSON: Jake, again, two of those inspector generals under President Obama resigned under the scrutiny of my oversight.

So, again, I'm not going to speak specifically to this case, with -- quite honestly, with this inspector general, both Senator Grassley and I have had had a real problem with his responsiveness to in particularly one oversight request.

I spoke with senior officials both in the White House and the State Department. I understand their reasoning. I don't know whether they're going to provide a more robust rationale for why they do it. But I understand it. And I don't disagree with it.

I don't think anything that this administration could say is going to satisfy some people. There will still be people huffing and puffing and stomping their feet. But, again, it is the president's decision whether or not to hire or terminate an inspector general.

TAPPER: Well, what was their reasoning?

Because all the public knows is that this acting inspector general was investigating whether or not Secretary of State Pompeo was misusing a political appointee to do personal errands for him. That's according to Democratic aides on Capitol Hill.

And then a senior administration official has said Pompeo asked Trump to remove this inspector general investigating him, and President Trump did so.

What are they telling you that makes you feel like you understand their reasoning?

JOHNSON: Again, I'm -- I'm -- I'm not going discuss my private conversations with senior administration officials.

But my guess, this will all come out. Congress will be able to do what oversight it choose to do. I'm sure the Democrats in the House will call in Mr. Linick, and he will be able to testify, and he will be able to tell his story.

And my guess, the administration will hopefully have an opportunity to tell their side of the story as well.

I'm not crying big crocodile tears over this termination. Let's put it that way.

TAPPER: Let's talk about the list of Obama administration officials that you and Senator Grassley released this week.

Just so our viewers understand, in 2016, at the same time the U.S. was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 elections, several members of the Obama administration requested the name of a U.S. citizen who appeared in various intelligence reports.

This person in the cases that you have cited turned out to be General Flynn. It's called unmasking. It's not uncommon.

You praised the director of national intelligence for his transparency in declassifying these names. I'm wondering if you would be willing to also push for transparency when it comes to the transcripts of these calls, especially the calls between General Flynn and Russian Ambassador Kislyak, who seemed -- that seems to be part of this.

Have you asked for those transcripts to be released as well?

JOHNSON: Not yet. But we have just really began our investigation in this particular aspect.

This -- Jake, this is one piece of the puzzle. I'm all for transparency. I think we way overclassify information. And, as a result, there's all kinds of wrongdoing can occur, and the American public never has a clue about what is happening.

But what I'm very heartened by is, we finally have a logjam broken in terms of Congress getting information to conduct our oversight. I have been on this case really in some way, shape or form since March 2015 with the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal, which kind of morphed into the whole Russian collusion, because the same -- the same cast of characters.

But what just got released, because I had a staff member that went down into the secure area the Senate, went through the FISA report in -- with a fine-tooth comb, found four footnotes that completely rebutted the main text of the FISA report, showing that the FBI knew full -- full well that the Russian disinformation was actually part of the Steele dossier, and the FBI knew it.

The FBI knew full well that there was no collusion by the end of January, and yet they engineered, through James Comey, the appointment of a special counsel.

TAPPER: Right.

JOHNSON: There's an awful lot of unanswered questions that need to be answered.

TAPPER: But -- but...

JOHNSON: And it's going to require transparency, yes.

So I am all for transparency. I think the American people need to -- deserve and hear the full truth. And that's what I'm going to try and get.

TAPPER: OK. So, in addition to the transcripts, which hopefully you will push for to be released as well, I'm wondering, did you also ask to declassify the reports that justify why these unmaskings were requested and approved?

Because just listing the names and the dates, we don't -- and the fact that it resulted in the unmasking of General Flynn, we don't know what this is about. Obviously, he was an unregistered foreign agent for Turkey at the time. He later registered retroactively.

[09:50:05] So, there are a whole bunch of questions that people might have had. Are you going to ask for that to be released as well, the justification?

JOHNSON: Yes, I want all this information to come out.

One thing we have found out is that the FBI was ready to close the file on General Flynn on January 4 because they'd found nothing. You -- you mentioned all those other possibilities, but they didn't find anything wrong.

So they were going to close the file, until the seventh floor -- that's James Comey's office -- kind of called down and talked to Peter Strzok, and said, hey, let's keep this open. Then they start talking about the Logan Act.

And, apparently, President Obama was aware of this as well. So there are an awful lot of unanswered questions, going back to the text that I continue to highlight December, 15, 2016. Strzok texts Page: "Think our sisters are leaking like mad, scorned, worried and political. They're kicking into overdrive."

Our committee conducting a study, showed 125 leaks in the first 126 days; 62 had to do with national security. That compares with eight under the Obama administration.

Something is amiss here. Something was going wrong. I don't know exactly what happened, but we're getting a clearer picture of it. I think the chickens are coming home to roost.

And, hopefully, myself, with the -- hopefully, other senators -- Chuck Grassley has been a real partner -- we will get to the truth.

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: What exactly do you mean? What exactly is -- look, obviously, there -- there are questions about FBI behavior. Peter Strzok was fired. Lisa Page resigned, et cetera. James Comey is no longer on the scene.

But what exactly are you alleging by the Obama administration, because I have yet to see any facts at all supporting this grand conspiracy that the Trump administration is pushing?

JOHNSON: Well, Jake, it's because a lot of members of the media haven't been asking the questions, haven't been looking.

Let's face it. There were -- there were selective leaks. They ramped up this entire Russian collusion hoax. And it was a hoax. And who is the recipients of these leaks?

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: I don't know what you mean when you call it a hoax, though, sir.

(CROSSTALK)

JOHNSON: It was members of the media.

(CROSSTALK)

JOHNSON: ... 18 different outlets.

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: Sir, you say...

(CROSSTALK)

JOHNSON: What I -- what I'd love to see is, I'd like to see members -- I would like to see members of the press actually start looking into all these leaks and how this story got spun up that resulted in a special counsel and put this country through about three years of a mini-constitutional crisis.

TAPPER: So, Senator -- Senator...

JOHNSON: That's what I'd like to see.

TAPPER: Senator, it's not a hoax that the Russians attempted to interfere in the 2016 election.

JOHNSON: Yes.

TAPPER: You know that. It's not a hoax.

JOHNSON: They -- they -- they put Russian disinformation into the Steele dossier that was bought and paid for through cutouts for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: They hacked into the D...

JOHNSON: That is what we had found out, Jake. You got to look at the evidence.

TAPPER: Sir...

JOHNSON: Look at those footnotes that we have declassified. That's the truth.

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: I'm not disputing -- I'm not disputing it, the idea that we don't know what was in the Steele dossier, but -- and how it got there and whether it was disinformation.

But that's not what I'm talking about.

You're suggesting that the entire Russia interference campaign was a hoax. And it was not. The Senate Intelligence Committee, run by a Republican, has concluded it was not. Every single inspector general of the intelligence community and of all these agencies have said, it was not a hoax. The Russians were trying to interfere.

(CROSSTALK)

JOHNSON: The hoax is that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The disinformation that Russia put into the 2016 campaign flowed through the Steele dossier and Hillary Clinton.

No, I'm -- I'm not denying that Russia tried to intervene our election. They have been doing it probably since their founding. That's what they do. I'm chairman of the Foreign Senate...

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: Right, but can we get back to unmasking, though?

JOHNSON: Sure.

TAPPER: If we could get back to unmasking for a second.

So, unmasking, as you know, is not uncommon. It happens. I'm sure you also know that unmasking has actually increased under the Trump administration...

JOHNSON: I am.

TAPPER: ... compared to the Obama administration, against -- again, there's nothing nefarious with it.

People charged with national security want to see who individual Russians and others who are talking -- they're talking to unnamed Americans. They want to know who the Americans are.

That's -- there's nothing -- I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it.

If this is something that can be abused, something you're concerned about, are you using any of your oversight capacity to investigate what the Trump administration is doing as well, almost 17,000 unmasking requests in 2018?

JOHNSON: Right. I saw the report that, under Obama's last couple years, it was under 10,000, and now the last couple years, it's been 16,000, 17,000. And that troubles me.

So, absolutely, I'm going to be looking into that. I want to know exactly what happened.

Is it usual and customary for -- for the inner circle within the White House to be requesting unmasking, or is this primarily done within the intelligence agencies? I want to get all that information.

I want the American people to hear the full and complete truth. TAPPER: The last thing is, sir, you have not made the allegation that

the Trump administration is making, which is that President Obama committed crimes. You haven't said anything along those lines.

But your work, your requesting of this information of the national -- the director of national intelligence, Ric Grenell -- and, again, I'm pro-transparency, too. Release at all.

But your work is being cited as an example -- as evidence for this crackpot conspiracy theory. Does that bother you?

[09:55:03]

JOHNSON: Well, again, you keep calling it a crackpot conspiracy theory.

I'm just trying to find out what happened. What I do know, because we finally got these records out of the National Archives, what President Obama saw when he got those e-mails from Hillary Clinton was not HillaryClinton.Senate -- or StateDepartment.gov.classified. It was Clinton.e-mail.com.

President Obama knew she was using a private server. And section 793- F, the section that I think...

TAPPER: OK, I got to...

JOHNSON: ... that I think Hillary Clinton violated, also includes knowledge of misuse of intelligence.

TAPPER: OK.

JOHNSON: So, I have always thought...

TAPPER: OK.

JOHNSON: ... that was one of the main reasons they covered up for Hillary Clinton and exonerated her.

TAPPER: OK.

All right, Senator Johnson, stay healthy.

JOHNSON: It's just the truth -- just the truth, Jake.

TAPPER: I really appreciate your time today.

JOHNSON: Stay healthy. Take care.

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