U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff on the Political Crisis in Venezuela

AMANPOUR: You use the term mob tactics and you’ve talked about a pattern of obstruction of justice and you did actually write a letter saying that, “Efforts to intimidate witnesses, scare their family members or prevent them from testifying before Congress are textbook mob tactics that we condemn in the strongest terms. The president should make no statement or take any action to obstruct Congress’ independent oversight and investigative efforts.” Just to be clear, are you saying that these threats amounts to obstruction of justice?

SCHIFF: I’m saying that they are evidence of an attempt to obstruct justice. And you can imagine, if any of these things were done in private, let’s say, we learned about a private conversation between the president of the United States and Michael Cohen in which the president said, “If you testify, I’m going to urge the Justice Department to investigate your father-in-law, maybe investigate your wife,” that would be very clear efforts to intimidate a witness. The fact that it’s done in the open doesn’t make it any better. And, you know, it’s certainly true, I think that the public has become numb to this completely improper conduct by the president of the United States and sometimes we just need to wake up and see what’s right before our eyes. But we cannot accept the president of the United States who acts like a mafia don, basically says that people shouldn’t cooperate with investigators, that they are rats that the people we should respect are those that refused to cooperate and go to prison for various Federal crimes, that people that are willing to testify against him, he’s going to do everything he can to have their family members investigated. This is not conduct that we can tolerate.

AMANPOUR: So, I find it really interesting in light of what you’ve just said, in light of what’s happening in Venezuela, that, in fact, it’s not a Russia investigation that you will be chairing first on your docket. The first up is the investigating the rise of authoritarianism around the world. Why did you make that choice and that decision?

SCHIFF: Well, to me, this is always been the much bigger story as we’ve gotten caught sometimes in the minutia of what Rudy Giuliani says in the morning and what he contradicts himself in the evening or the twists and turns of the Russian investigators, we’ve missed the bigger picture, which is — not only that Russia has been intervening in many other countries to undermine their democracies but even more broadly than that, there is a real challenge to liberal democracy around the world, there is a rise of autocracy in every corner of the globe from Venezuela to the Philippines to Egypt to Istanbul, obviously Russia and Poland and Hungary, all over the world you see a rise of autocracy.