CNN "The Situation Room" - Transcript: Interview with Jim Himes

Interview

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REP. JIM HIMES (D-CT): Well, Wolf, and it's good to be with you. I would say that I think they are probably being very, very careful here because I suspect that they, like the rest of us, don't know how far this extends.

I mean, it's shocking enough in and of itself that journalists had their records pulled and weren't told about it. Members of Congress of the opposition party had their records pulled. And now it turns out that the president's own White House counsel had his records pulled. So, who else did? We don't know that.

And by the way, you know, talk about trying figure stuff out. You would have thought that if members of Congress were having their phone records subpoenaed and they weren't being permitted know about it, you would have thought that the attorney general wouldn't just have known about that, but would have spent days thinking about the implications of that.

And yet, you know, former Attorney General Barr and former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein are both saying we didn't know about it. So, what does that mean? Was that a rogue operation in the Department of Justice? So, to answer your question, this thing is so big that I suspect they are trying to get their arms around what the boundaries are of what happened.

BLITZER: I suspect you're right. If members of Congress, congressman, weren't the targets of these leak investigations, then why won't the Biden Justice Department at least come out and say so?

HIMES: Well, again, I think they are probably trying to get their arms around what actually happened. I mean, what do we actually know? We know that two Democrats and it just happens to be the two Democrats who arguably were most outspoken in their opposition to Donald Trump.

We know that they had their records pulled. I apparently didn't, you know. Were Republicans or was it just the two outspoken critics of the president?

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And the other thing we know, of course, is that the Department of Justice ultimately said there's nothing there. There's nothing there. Was going to shut down the investigation, but then apparently, Attorney General Barr revived it.

So my guess is to, again, to answer your question, is that they probably within the Department of Justice, they are making sure they understand the full scope of this assault on our democracy before they start talking about it publicly.

BLITZER: Does it make any sense, congressman, why former White House counsel, Don McGahn and his wife, and his wife, would have been subjected to these extraordinary subpoenas?

HIMES: Well, it's completely unprecedented. All of this is almost completely unprecedented. You know, we had members of the press having their records subpoenaed before. Members of Congress, probably historically unprecedented in 240 years of American history. The president's own lawyer, the White House counsel and his wife, as you point out totally unprecedented.

So, it's hard to say if it makes sense. I can speculate and say because it sure looks this way that the president and his people, the president and or his people were targeting the president's either enemies, political enemies or people that fell under suspicion.

Think about that. Think about the president of the United States having the ability to use the awesome power of the Department of Justice to go after his political opposition. Wolf, that is what happens in the worst of the worst of the banana republics and evidently, it happened here during the Trump administration.

BLITZER: And all of the men at the top of the Justice Department now claim they knew nothing at all about this. Congressman Jim Himes, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

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