GOP Colleagues “Accountable for Destruction of Democracy”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, we just were discussing January 6th and we turn to Washington politics where the investigation into that insurrection is heating up. The House Committee leading it has voted to hold Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser, in criminal contempt for defying a subpoena. He’s refused to appear in court after Former President Trump’s lawyers told him not to testify or to provide documents. Democrat Adam Schiff is a committee member and he’s also author of a new book “Midnight in Washington.” And here he is speaking with Michel Martin about why he believed the attack fundamentally weakened the United States.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Congressman Adam Schiff, thank you for joining us.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA), Author, “Midnight in Washington”: It’s great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: I’d like to start with some news from where we are right now. A select committee of the House has been trying to investigate the events of January 6th. They’ve issued subpoenas to former staffers and supporters of the former president. To this point, they’ve been ignored. And as this point, as we are speaking now, the former president has even filed a lawsuit against the January 6th Committee and National Archives seeking to block the release of his White House records related to the capitol attack. So, can I just first start by asking you, how do you respond to that?

SCHIFF: He’s going to lose the litigation, first of all. Because the current president, Joe Biden, is not asserting executive privilege. He recognizes the extraordinary circumstances we’re in. This is an investigation into a bloody attack on our democracy, on our capitol. And so, Trump will lose the litigation, but his whole point is to delay. And we will work to expedite and get a quick court decision rejecting this, I think, demonstrably meritless, you know, claim on Donald Trump’s part. I think even more promising is the fact that we are holding Steve Bannon in contempt, criminal contempt and we will be referring that to the Justice Department for prosecution. And that, I think, is the swiftest most powerful remedy for those who refuse to provide information. He has color book claim for privilege. He wasn’t part of the administration, for years, prior to the events we’re talking about. And by law, the Justice Department has a duty to present that to the Grand Jury, and we will expect them to do so.

MARTIN: The current president, Joe Biden, has expressed the view that Steve Bannon should be prosecuted. And as you know, some Republicans have objected to his commenting on this, saying this indicates that the fix is in, that isn’t being fairly adjudicated. What’s your response to that?

SCHIFF: Well, the president said, you know, essentially people do not follow the law, that ignore the law should be prosecuted. He didn’t make it — particular to any one person and the White House has been very clear that the Justice Department will ultimately make these decisions in specific cases. But I think the president is right that for four years, we had this lawless administration. We had people willy-nilly simply refuse to respond to lawful subpoenas, and that those days should be over. I view this as early test case of whether our democracy is recovering. And look, one of the things that I had described in the book is the first time Steve Bannon came in to testify before Congress during the Russia investigation, then led by Republicans. He was under subpoena when he came in the second time. The first time was voluntarily. He didn’t answer the questions. He was subpoenaed by the Republicans. The second time, he brought 25 questions. He would only answer the only 25 is when to answer and they were written out for him by the White House, the subject of our investigation. And he got away with it. And I think that led him to believe he can get away with it now. But back then, you had attorney generals under the Trump administration who view their job as essentially a criminal defense firm for Donald Trump, and that is no longer the case.

MARTIN: I can imagine that this is very frustrating to you and other Democrats. Why does it seem to be so difficult to hold people to account to this kind of conduct?

SCHIFF: Oh, it is really astonishing. You know, I often look at one little vignette of the last four years that’s so telling about where we are as a country. A guy runs for president on a platform of building a wall which he says Mexico is going to pay for. He becomes president, of course, Mexico doesn’t pay for a wall. Wall doesn’t get built. His cronies, including Steve Bannon, raise money from Trump’s own supporters to build the wall and then they steal it. And then, Trump pardons him for stealing from his own people. And this is the guy refusing to testify before Congress. It shows you just what a group of grifters we were dealing with over the last four years. But also shows you the degree to which they think that they’re above the law. And part of the reason why they do, honestly, has to do with the fact that for four years, the people that I served with in Congress cared more about their position, their party, their power than they did our constitution, than any notions of right and wrong. Congress had remedies during the last four years. We could have withheld funding from the Trump administration. We could have insisted. We could have with withhold confirmations. But one party, the Republic Party, wasn’t willing to do it. They were will to sacrifice their own constitutional interests in order to placate this president of their party.

MARTIN: Well, in fact, let’s talk about your book now, because your book is, in part, a meditation on how you think we got to this point, your take in how you got to this point. You know, you obviously have strong words about the former president and, you know, his close, you know, allies, people who work for him, you know, with him in the White House. But really, I would say your strongest criticism is directed at colleagues in Congress. Why is it that really you hold them responsible for this?

SCHIFF: I hold them responsible because Donald Trump could not have done any of the things he did without their willing and sometimes enthusiastic participation and help. And I fully believe that when we have a greater perspective on this part of our history that they will suffer some of the most severe judgments of history. Because they understood what they were doing was wrong. And, you know, just to use the most recent and terrible illustration of this, on January 6th, and I described, as you know, in vivid detail what it was like to be on the house floor as they’re breaking in the doors and breaking the windows. I have to say, well, I was, you know, traumatized by what was going on. I was even more angered in a way at my colleagues. These people that were attacking the police and climbing the walls of the capitol, they believed the big lie. But the people inside the chamber with me, people I’ve taken to calling insurrectionists in suits and ties, they understood it was a big lie and they kept telling it anyway. And even after that attack, even while there was still blood on the floor, we went back into session, they were still trying to overturn the election. Still pushing the big lie. And to me, that’s unconscionable. If we can’t rely on our elections. If people lose faith in our election’s ability to decide, right, you know, which party should govern and who should represent us, then what’s left but violence? And so, you’re — Michel, you’re absolutely right. I hold them personally deeply accountable for this destruction of our democracy.

MARTIN: You know, we often hear from people who spend a lot of time on Capitol Hill that, you know, they know that what they’re saying is not true. I mean, I hear this from reporters all the time, I hear this with my colleagues all the time. How do you know they know it’s not true?

SCHIFF: Well, they will tell you they know what they’re saying is not true. And I use a vivid anecdote in the story that took place well before the insurrection. I’m talking to Kevin McCarthy on the plane about who was going to win the 2010 midterms. And I said —

MARTIN: Currently, he is the House minority in the house. He’s the leader of the Republican minority in the House,

SCHIFF: Yes. And at the time, he had a different position of leadership in the Republican Party. And we had this conversation on the plane about who is going to win the midterms that were then six months away. I said, the Democrats would win. He said, the Republicans would win. It was a total nothing of a conversation. And we get to Washington. We go our separate ways. And he goes off and he does a press briefing. And he tells the press that Republicans are going to win the midterms. Everybody knows it. He sat with Adam Schiff on the plane and Adam Schiff admitted Republicans were going to win the midterms. And I was incredulous. And I went up to him on the House floor and said, Kevin, first of all, if we’re having a private conversation, I would have thought it was a private conversation. But if wasn’t, you know, I said the exact opposite of what you told the press. And he looks and says, yes, I know, Adam. But you know how it goes. And for many of them, that’s exactly how it goes. And they are willing to publicly mislead their constituents in the country if it just helps them gain power or helps them keep it. During, you know, the height of the Russia investigation. When I’m being, you know, villainized on Fox, I would have Republicans — sometimes even seen Republicans walk by me in the capitol and say in a hushed voice say, keep doing what you’re doing. And so, you know, they understand, they recognize, they’re smart people. They recognize that Donald Trump lost and he lost handily. But they’re scared to contradict him. And it’s more important, evidently, for them to keep their position than to tell the country the truth and that, I don’t understand. Because I can’t imagine that’s why they ran for Congress. I can’t imagine that Steve Scalise, when he decided to run for Congress, decided that, I want to run for Congress because one day I hope to mislead the country about a presidential election and undermine the fabric of our democracy. But the story of how people came to do that and continued to do that is, I think, a story that needs to be told.

MARTIN: You really trace the sort of a seeds of what happened on January 6th, really all the way back to the 2016 election when there was an effort made by Russia to interfere or involve itself in the 2016 election. You make the argument that if accountability had been had then, then perhaps, perhaps, the subsequent events would not have happened. So, what went wrong there? Tell us.

SCHIFF: Well, I think the country learned what it did about Trump’s complicity in what Russia was doing very peace no (ph), very drip by drip over a two-year period. And during that two-year period, even as the facts were coming out showing that the Russians offered — directly offered to president’s son to help win the election, dirt on Hillary Clinton and as evidence came out about the president’s eagerness to get the help and his connection with the platform, WikiLeaks, that was the cutout for the Russians to publish this stuff. Even as we learned that Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, was secretly meeting with agent of Kremlin intelligence and giving them internal polling data and that same unit of Russian intelligence was running the social media campaign to elect Donald Trump, even as we’re learning all these things, we’re learning them in bits and pieces. The public doesn’t get to see the whole picture at once. And Donald Trump is using the biggest microphone in the world to repeat endlessly and over and over, no collusion, no corruption. And his amplifiers on Fox are saying the same thing. It really obscured, I think, in the public mind what really happened. And that made it very difficult to hold him accountable. Ultimately, when we had perhaps the best opportunity to explain to the country what we had found, it was that hearing with Bob Mueller, which was not the same Bob Mueller that he had been. And it is very telling that on the day after that hearing with Bob Mueller, when Donald Trump felt that he had escaped the jailer for his rushed misconduct, it was the very next day that he was on the phone with the presidents of Ukraine, this time asking yet another country to help him cheat in yet another election. And I think you can draw not only a straight line between the failure to hold him accountable for his Russian misconduct to leading to the Ukraine misconduct, and a direct line between the Senate refusing to hold him accountable for that misconduct and the insurrection. And now, what I fear is that we will be able to one day draw a line from the Republicans’ unwillingness to hold him accountable for the big lie and the incitement of that insurrection to something even worse in the future. How many times do we need to be told and reminded and demonstrated and shown the danger of not holding someone like that accountable?

MARTIN: And how do you feel that’s going? I guess would be the question. How do you feel about this country’s willingness to stand up for the principles, as you see it, that cause it to be the country that it is? That allows it to be the country it is. How is that going?

SCHIFF: Well, you know, it hasn’t gone well for four years. But we are a deeply resilient country. And I believe with every bone of my body, we’re going to get through this. And, you know, part of what I wanted to write about too in this book is about the heroic figures who emerged in this chapter who were showing us the way. Who demonstrated real courage at the risk of their firing or at the risk of their lives, that ought to inspire us. And I fully believe that those people and millions of Americans like them are what are going to get us through this, because those that love our democracy far outnumber those that are willing to tear it down right now. But we need to wake up to this threat. So many times, the last four years, we have asked ourselves whether something like this could really happen in America, and it has happened in America. The question has been answered. Yes, it can happen here. It is happening here. You know, among those that are the most powerful voices in this book interestingly are immigrants. People like Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindman and others. But you can meet them in everyday life. You ask anyone that’s come from a repressive country or country that’s lost its democracy and they will tell you, they see all the hallmarks in America right now of what they went through in their old country. So, the danger is real. How are we doing? Not so well. Are we going to get through this? Absolutely. And what’s going to get us through it? Well, we are going to fight to pass legislation to protect our voting rights and make sure that we do away with the gerrymandering and these other ways in which a minority of Americans can control the country, but we can’t put all of our eggs in that basket. We also — each one of us, needs to be doing our part to make sure that no one’s vote is taken away. And if we do that and we don’t try to do everything, if each individual in their own personal life tries to do one thing in the next year and a half to help save our democracy, then we will be able to look back on this as the time we went through a really dark chapter but we made it through. And that’s the future that I’m working towards and I’m confident that we will see.

MARTIN: Did January 6th — the events of January 6th make this country stronger or weaker in your view?

SCHIFF: I think we are unquestionably weaker, that it was a real body blow, probably the worst body blow to our democracy. And this body blow came from within. This was not some external attack on the country. This body blow was self-inflicted. And, you know, tragically, to add tragedy upon tragedy, there was a window of opportunity after January 6th in which it might have had the effect of casting and repudiating — casting aside or repudiating Donald Trump and Trumpism, and maybe the country could have really moved forward, clearly forward after that turbel attack. And then, maybe you could have said that at least something positive came out of this because it revealed the disastrous ends to which Donald Trump brought us. But it didn’t have that effect. And people are now making heroes of the attackers. They’re bringing a flag from insurrection day to Republican rallies in Virginia to help elect a Republican governor there. They’re celebrating these criminals as political prisoners. And so, we have not turned a corner. And that corner is yet to come. So, I wish I could tell you that there was something, anything about that day that marked a new beginning for the country in the sense of seeing the horror to which Donald Trump brought us, but we have not turned the corner.

MARTIN: Congressman Adam Schiff, your latest book is called “Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could,” thank you for talking with us. Clearly, there’s a lot to talk about.

SCHIFF: There sure is. Thank you so much.