MSNBC "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" - Transcript: Interview with Adam Schiff

Interview

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Leading off our discussion tonight is Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the capitol on January 6.

Chairman Schiff, thank you very much for joining us tonight.

This -- was this set of subpoenas issued by the committee the result of the unanimous vote or agreement of the committee to do this?

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA): Our committee has been unanimous really on all the steps we have taken. There is a remarkable degree of commonality in terms of wanting to get to the truth, being ready to use whatever tools, tactics, techniques we have to get to the truth. There is a common acceptance of the fact that no one is beyond the limits of our investigation if they have relevant information about January 6, and we`re not fooling around. We`re not going to waste time.

And so, you see these subpoenas going out to four key players that based on what we know to date have very relevant information about the run-up to January 6 and what happened on the day of that bloody insurrection.

O`DONNELL: What is your response to Donald Trump saying that they are going to fight these subpoenas on executive privilege?

[22:10:07]

SCHIFF: Well, it`s more of the same that we saw for four years when he said they were going to stonewall all subpoenas. It would be against type to expect anything else of the former president.

But, down, I think, look, it`s an acknowledgment of his belief of his own guilt and his desire to hide what he was doing on the 5th, what he was doing on the 6th. He doesn`t want the country to know.

But then we knew this already, because of course he intervened to try to shut down efforts in the House and Senate to establish a January 6 commission. And he succeeded. Mitch McConnell did his dirty work, but Speaker Pelosi appointed this select committee. It`s bipartisan, and we go forward and we`re not going to let the former president stand in our way.

MADDOW: Does the committee have a strategy for dealing with what could be at minimum a very, very long procedural delay imposed by Donald Trump fighting on executive privilege a legal fight that he may lose, but could take in as we`ve seen in the past literally years going through appeals courts?

SCHIFF: Well, we`ve been strategizing with the general counsel, the house general counsel about what will happen if we meet opposition, and we have to expect that with respect to some of the subpoenas we issue, there are going to be parties that resist. And so, we`ll move as expeditiously as we can. We`ll move in court if necessary.

We do have tools that we didn`t have in the last administration in that we can also hold people in criminal contempt and make a referral to the Justice Department. Now during the Trump years when you had people like Bill Barr running the Justice Department, he wasn`t about to enforce the law against the president of the United States, even when people were violating the law.

Bill Barr would do anything essentially up until the very end apparently that the president wanted. But now, that we have a very different Justice Department, a very different attorney general. And so, there are methods of enforcement we didn`t have before.

O`DONNELL: Kevin McCarthy has commented about the investigation, saying the only questions that matter are why was the Capitol so -- left so ill- prepared? And how can we make sure that this never happens again? Kevin McCarthy is saying that you are not investigating the question of how can we make sure this never happens again.

SCHIFF: Well, of course we are. One of the central objectives of our committee is to write a comprehensive report with recommendations about how do we prevent this from happening again. But Mr. McCarthy doesn`t want to look into how this came about to begin with because he played a role in that, and we want to find out just what that role was.

We know his efforts to decertify the election, but we don`t know a lot about the conversations that he had with the former president or with others in the lead-up to January 6 or on that day. But we can see through his actions and his words that he doesn`t want us to get to the bottom of it. But we will.

And we will take a very broad view of our responsibilities. We`re going to look into the propagation of the big lie and the role that played in the insurrection. We`re going to look at the way Meadows and others reportedly tried to get the justice department to press states like Georgia to appoint a bogus slate of electors.

We`re going to look into all of this. And to do less I think does a disservice to the American people.

O`DONNELL: Will there be another wave of subpoenas coming before you complete the work on these subpoenas or will subpoenas follow what you get from depositions from these witnesses?

SCHIFF: You know, I don`t have a specific answer yet in terms of when the next subpoenas will go out, but I think they`ll go out when we`re ready. And it doesn`t mean that we have to sequence that we need to hold the depositions of these witnesses before we can do more. I would expect that we will be doing interviews with people who are cooperative. Some of those may be very much in the public view, and many won`t be. We will be working along contemporaneous lines of investigation as we get documents as we identify witnesses now that we have staffed up and have much greater capacity, we`ll be moving along parallel tracks.

So we`re going move quickly. We realize there is urgency here both in terms of protecting the country, but also making sure that we get these answers and we get them without allowing the kind of delay we did during the Russian and Ukraine investigations.

O`DONNELL: Chairman Adam Schiff, thank you very much for joining us on this breaking news story. We really appreciate it.

SCHIFF: Thank you.

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