Congressman Adam Schiff Breaks Down Trump's Grand Jury Problem

-You're on the House Intelligence Committee.
You've been dealing a lot with the Russian investigation.
So, I'm happy you're here, but I don't think Donald Trump is.
He tweeted about you recently.
And right here we see, "Sleazy Adam Schiff,
the totally biased Congressman looking into Russia,
spends all of his time on television..."
so he's got you there. [ Laughter ]
"...pushing the Dem loss excuse."
So, when you first saw that,
from the president of the United States,
how did you feel?
-Well, I was getting on the plane to fly to Washington,
and my phone lit up with messages.
"The president just called you a sleaze."
-Uh-huh.
-And my reaction was, "I've been slimed."
-Yeah.
-Like a character on "Ghostbusters."
-You did.
-But my second reaction was,
he really should've talked to my friends from grade school.
-Yeah.
-With a name like Schiff, they did much better than he did.
There was a lot of material to work with there.
-Yeah, he usually does a really good with his, like,
disparaging nicknames.
But I feel like he dropped the ball.
-It was a missed opportunity.
-I feel like you're making him so angry
that you're blinding his ability to really dig in.
[ Laughter ]
-This is true.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-So, I want to talk about The Wall Street Journal
reported tonight that Special Counsel Mueller
has opened up a grand jury.
Now, you have a different investigation.
You're the House Intelligence Committee's investigation.
There's a Senate Judiciary Committee.
There's a Senate Intelligence Committee.
The grand jury is separate, but what can --
What does this tell you,
as somebody with your legal background,
that he has opened up a grand jury?
-Well, his responsibility is really different
than all of ours in Congress, because we're looking at
the whole range of what Russia did,
their active measures campaign, what tactics they employed.
He's looking at a very specific task,
and that is, were U.S. laws violated,
and if so, who should be prosecuted?
And the fact that he has now apparently, or reportedly,
gone to a grand jury means he now needs
the power of compulsion to get documents
to compel witnesses to testify.
That is a necessary step
to move forward to a potential prosecution.
Doesn't mean that he will prosecute.
But this is part of an investigation
very much moving forward.
-And another report said that he's sort of moving into
the financial element of this.
Donald Trump had said recently,
in speaking about Special Counsel Mueller,
that that was sort of a red line for him.
Why do you think it is that Donald Trump
is so worried about the financial part
of this investigation?
-Well, I'll tell you why I'm so concerned about it,
and that is, when people think about kompromat,
what the Russians call "compromising material,"
they tend to think about the dossier,
potentially salacious videos.
-It's all I think about.
[ Laughter ]
I wish you hadn't brought it up.
[ Laughter ]
-The far more compromising material would be
if the Russians were engaged,
as they do in other places, like Europe,
in illicit financial transactions
and money laundering or something like that
with the Trump organization.
Then, they would have very powerful compromising material
they could hold over his head, and it could affect U.S. policy.
So if Bob Mueller is looking into this,
you know, it's really quite necessary
to make sure that our policy is based
on U.S. national security interests,
not the personal exposure of the president of the United States.
And, obviously, this deeply worries the president.
Now, whether that says something
about his financial dealings in the past remains to be seen,
but plainly, this is what got him,
once again, to talk about possibly removing Mueller.
-Now, you were talking about, "Did the Russians do anything
to compromise the Trump administration,
Donald Trump personally?"
And this is interesting, because the Russians,
you could find in your investigation
that the Russians did things, and it turns out
that the Trumps were not aware of this.
And Jared Kushner sort of made that argument --
it was in a leaked audio -- to Congressional interns
that we couldn't have colluded with the Russians.
He basically said, "We couldn't even collude
with our own campaign."
Like, basically, making an argument of incompetence.
Which isn't a bad argument.
[ Laughter ]
-Well, and the speaker has often made the same argument.
-Yes.
-You know, "Don't hold the president responsible.
He doesn't know what he's doing."
-"He's new."
-"He's new." -Yeah.
-"He's inexperienced. He's not a politician."
-All things that would've been great to hear
on the campaign trail, yeah.
-Yes. Absolutely.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-So, I want to ask this, as well.
I'm imagining that you have a lot of people that see you
and see your investigation as some sort of savior
for the Democratic party.
Like, this, you're gonna discover something
that's gonna push him out of office.
It strikes me that the Democrats are at risk right now,
as a party, of putting too much stock
in hoping that an investigation
brings about the end of the Trump administration
when the focus should be at where you hope
administrations end -- at the ballot box.
Do you think the Democratic party is doing enough messaging
outside of their investigations into the Trump administration,
as far as, "Hey, the next time you vote,
we actually have a message that is independent
of what we think is wrong with the current people in power"?
-You know, this is, I think, absolutely essential,
and that is, yes, we have do go forward with the investigation,
and that's very important for the reasons we talked about,
but more than that, we need to give voters a positive --
a powerful positive reason to vote for Democrats,
not just all the reasons they don't like Donald Trump,
which they know already.
And I think the real key to that
is addressing the economic concerns that people have,
particularly in distressed communities
where they look at a small global world.
They look at automation replacing a lot of jobs,
and they ask, and they have every right to ask,
"What are you offering us to give us hope
that our lives can be better,
that our children's lives can be better?"
They have every right to ask that.
We need to have a good answer for them.
The Republicans have no answer except,
"You're gonna win so much,
you're gonna be tired of winning."
Well, they're not tired of winning.
-No.
-But we owe them a good answer, too,
and we are working on it.
It's, I think, not only vital to the Democratic party,
it's vital to the country.
If we're gonna have a situation where we continue
to pass on to the next generation
a higher quality of life,
we're gonna have to answer that very difficult
but very important economic question.
-I look forward to seeing -- hearing what those answers are
from the party.
Last thing -- every day --
I pay attention to this stuff every day.
The part of me that can be shocked --
I keep waiting to be numbed -- but every day,
something happens where I go, "What?!"
Does that still happen for you?
-Every day it happens. -Okay.
-It -- -All right.
It's nice to see you're not jaded.
-I like to say I'm running out of adjectives and expletives.
-Well, there you go. [ Laughter ]
We have to start --
Yeah, we have to find more of those for this.
Thank you so much for being here.
Really appreciate it. -Thank you.
-Congressman Adam Schiff, everybody!

Congressman Adam Schiff Breaks Down Trump's Grand Jury Problem

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