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adam schiff has another point to make in laying out these facts his argument in this book sort of writ large is that before the january 6th attack on the capital of which he gives an absolutely harrowing account in the book before donald trump's impeachment his first impeachment for trying to extort the ukrainian government into going after joe biden as his expected political opponent in 2020 an impeachment that congressman's chef led and of which he gives a blow-by-blow behind-the-scenes gripping telling in this book before all of that it was during the russia investigation that he saw the beginnings of what would become a full-fledged crisis of democracy in the aftermath of the 2020 election we often talk about the republican party being captured by donald trump becoming this anti-democracy party that we're grappling with as a country right now but schiff watched that transformation happen up close in very human and very personal terms not just in terms of what he observed from trump but what he observed from his republican colleagues turning into people he literally did not recognize schiff says quote that story the story of how good people were persuaded to abandon their beliefs and ideology their dedication to something larger than themselves and their ambition how they came to embrace an ugly nativism that their party had long held at bay that's the one i wished to tell by the time the russia investigation was over the republican party and its leadership in congress would be broken the ukraine misconduct that followed was the logical consequence not only of trump's belief that he'd escaped accountability for seeking foreign interference in the 2016 campaign and lying about it but also of his recognition that the republicans in congress would never confront him never constrained him they'd been fully and successfully cowed the dye had already been cast and as we would see following his acquittal during the first impeachment trial each further proof of gop acquiescence in his immorality would lead to further abuses of his power this new book from congressman adam schiff midnight in washington it's a stunning look at what the trump years have done to us as human beings and congressman schiff's argument about where we go from here is that it is only human agency the willingness of individual people to be brave and speak truth to power and bear the consequences of it that is the only thing that will get us out of what remains an existential danger to us as a democracy i felt myself stiffen in more than a decade of speaking with robert mueller i had never heard him grope for words yet as jerry nadler continued to ask him questions mueller seemed increasingly halting and uncertain when nadler asked did any senior white house official refuse a request to be interviewed by you and your team mueller's eyes darted left and right visibly searching his memory i don't believe so he said now i was alarmed nadler's question was almost rhetorical i could see that nadler was equally puzzled he raised his eyebrows in disbelief and said slowly the president mueller raised a hand in recognition of his error well i take let me take that back he said i winced at the sight of this and turned to my democratic colleagues it was heartbreaking to see robert mueller this person whom i so admired having difficulty answering some of the most basic questions even on a bad day mueller had been capable of performing better than 99 of the witnesses i'd heard testify in my decades of public service but this was not the bob mueller i knew two years had brought a striking change and i suddenly understood not only his own reluctance to testify but the protective instincts of his dedicated staff had i known how much he had changed i would not have pursued his testimony with such vigor in fact i would not have pursued it at all joining us now is the chairman of the house intelligence committee the author of midnight in washington how we almost lost democracy and still could california congressman adam schiff chairman of the intelligence committee mr chairman thank you for being here congratulations on this book oh thank you and thank you for the beautiful description of it i was struck by um sort of learning about how you learned um in this it seems like uh you were sort of you were built backwards in time to be ready to be the chairman of the intelligence committee at a time that there were questions about a president being compromised by russia given your background and having been a prosecutor and involved in these things and having lived and vis lived in and visited the former soviet union uh it does sort of feel like um you're either star-crossed or destined for this doesn't it uh well it did feel at times like certain parts of my life prepared me for what was to come in very unexpected ways i never thought i would see another illustration of russian tradecraft at work like i did in the miller case but but the president in so many ways resembled the kind of target that miller was he was a philanderer he had poor morals and a lack of ethics he had the same greed except on a far greater scale than miller and you know unlike miller where the russians could you know dangle gold donald trump was actively pursuing this very uh lucrative project in moscow the russians didn't even need to dangle anything he was he was pursuing it proactively himself and to realize that the president uh was you know as vulnerable a target as richard miller uh and what was you know quite a shocking revelation but certainly seeing that kind of tradecraft in the past recognizing how the russians worked how uh you know they do their psychological operations how they study the the psychology of their target and know how to manipulate people it seemed quite familiar when you write in the book about um what was going on in the 2016 campaign you have a vivid anecdote about you and senator dianne feinstein of california speaking on the phone and she's saying are you seeing what i'm seeing in terms of what russia appeared to be doing to try to help the trump campaign and the way that trump appeared to be towing the kremlin line on everything on even very controversial things that otherwise didn't really map to u.s politics in a way that was understandable um it it did feel like you said you did try to sort of sound the alarm now that alarm has been widely sounded the mueller investigation which i want to talk about more about in a minute the impeachment sagas the entire drama of the trump um of trump's one term in office is now laid bare before us and it does seem like the republican party would be happy to put him back in the oval office um despite everything that we learned about him that to me is sort of soul sucking you remain sort of optimistic that we can get past that and that republicans can change despite what you're seeing from them right now about their willingness to abide this stuff uh you know i do remain optimistic and uh and just as and i keep coming back to something robert carroll once said in an interview that power doesn't corrupt as much as it reveals it doesn't always reveal us for our best but it reveals and for every story of it revealing in people a willingness to sacrifice everything they claim to believe in their whole ideology all of the endless capitulation to this immoral president that we saw by so many republicans in congress and so many people joined the trump administration for every story like that i also got to meet people like marie ivanovic uh this courageous ambassador of ours uh who is being threatened being hated out of her post uh in ukraine uh who has the courage to stand up to the the most powerful man in the country to step into this hearing room when the president was telling her not to to stare down uh uh you know this this uh phalanx of trump acolytes so vilifying her and who paved the way for others to show courage uh the alexander venmans and fiona hills and so many others in large ways and small when i when i see those stories which i love to write about it vindicates for me the founders belief that we possess sufficient virtue to be self-governing that we don't need a tyrant ruling over us so i am optimistic we'll get through this we're very resilient country but what we do now will determine how quickly we can get through this let me ask you about um that that short portion of the book that i just read moments ago about your sort of revelation about robert mueller mueller led having led the mueller investigation into what russia did and whether the trump campaign was deliberately colluding with the russian government's um actions on trump's behalf um and then you write with incredible clarity about how angered and disgusted and dismayed you were about how william barr handled um the receipt of that report and it's his misleading roll out of it to the public but you were shocked um that robert mueller effectively wasn't going to make a good witness that he was not the person who you had expected to be testifying there that he had changed since you had last seen him in public do you believe looking back on it that mueller shouldn't have led that inquiry that it should have been somebody else or is your regret only that somebody else should have testified about the content of the report my regret only is in forcing him to testify when um i could understand the moment he did why his staff had been so reluctant he wasn't able to bring the report really fully to life uh he just wasn't the same man that i knew uh from years earlier and that's my regret is forcing him to testify that way i think he led a brilliant investigation i think he's a man of just incredible integrity and the one thing that really does strike me too and you mentioned bill barr is in very much the same way that donald trump uh imagine ever imagines everyone is like him that everyone lies like he does everyone is corrupt like he is um i think that bob mueller being this man of unquestioned integrity also presumes of others that they share the same devotion to the truth and have the same rectitude and i think he must have been astonished that bill barr would so betray his work uh would lie to the american people about what was in his report uh repeatedly uh and and so i think you have the illustration of a really good man in bob mueller who presumes the best in everyone else uh and then you have the the exact opposite in donald trump the book is called midnight in washington how we almost lost democracy and still could uh with remarkable anecdotes about kevin mccarthy and why and congressman schiff's telling he absolutely should be nowhere near the speakership of the united states house remarkable anecdotes about lindsey graham remarkable anecdotes about devin nunes about a lot of his democratic colleagues um congressman schiff this is um politicians don't like don't write great books but this was um a fascinating read and this is an exception to the politicians don't write book don't write good books role this is a good one thank you for doing it thank you i'm glad i could break the mold indeed in many ways he has admitted publicly that he has no idea how elections work in wisconsin but he's looked enough to know that things don't look good to him today wisconsin's actual state attorney general is pushing back hard on the republican investigation led by this guy this investigation is not being professionally or competently conducted by former justice gableman's own admission the investigators here are learning the basics of election administration as they go what we are seeing is corrosive to our democracy my request to speaker boss is simple shut this fake investigation down wisconsin's attorney general asking that state assembly to shut this fake investigation down but meanwhile all over the state of wisconsin there's all these people who have to respond to these requests and demands and subpoenas for sensitive election documents or at least they're trying to figure out if they should when they arrive from random gmail accounts with clipart fake letterhead and they're told to arrive at a shared workspace that's connected to a liposuction clinic i mean what do you do especially if what you are being subpoenaed and and requested to hand over is sensitive stuff like election documents election materials election machines there's immense security concerns there it's a it's a it's just it's a silly situation in terms of the seriousness of this investigation that republicans are conducting wisconsin but it's a serious question to the individual officials who have to decide what they're going to do now that they're being told legally they must comply with it joining us now scott mcdonnell he's the county clerk for dane county which is the second largest county in wisconsin includes the capital city of the great city of madison mr mcdonald thank you so much for being here it's nice to see you yeah thanks for having me so we spoke last month um and this investigation had just started we talked about the fact that you'd received something that seemed like a sort of sketchy email telling you to preserve records from the 2020 election i just wanted to get an update from you about the the progress of that request and whether you've had any further guidance binding or otherwise as to how you're supposed to deal with these requests and demands no we haven't had any official communication from mr gableman um there is no security protocol set up uh i watch the youtube videos just like you rachel that's how i get my information um is it clear to you that you are legally bound to hand anything over to him well i mean if you if you consider it like an open records request there are things that anyone could request that we would provide um you know they were the initial requests related to server logs and and things that what you really can't give away that that's the kind of thing that would allow someone to hack an election so um but you know there's other materials that you can request i mean we publish every single ballot image here in dane county to the web anyone can click through them you can't see who they voted for like who it's connected to but you can look at the ballots so a lot of this material is already online and a lot of people have asked for this information that he's now asking for including the committee that he supposedly represents has almost all the information i think he wants he just hasn't bothered to look at it it is um we have sort of a conundrum i think in the national media this is true in arizona as well when you look at the the the actual way that these investigations or audits are being carried out it is laughable in some ways and they are silly in some ways and they just don't make basic sense in some ways and that would generally lead you when you're sort of deciding what to talk about in the country that that's something that isn't serious and and shouldn't be reported upon that said these are actual election results that he's after the election materials that he is subpoenaing or demanding or or or or asking to have him to hand it over to him um these are the real records and it would seem to me that this is sort of in equal parts silly but also dangerous in terms of what what he's asking you to do in terms of the security of these materials and how this is being represented to the people of wisconsin in terms of whether there really was something wrong with the election that's how i see it looking at it from a media perspective i don't know if that resonates with you at all as a as a pro who's right in the middle of this yeah i think originally there was some concern that this was going to go the route of the arizona audit where we were going to start going through every ballot and and and that but it seems to have gone the route now of ginning up some of the old complaints and conspiracies about the election you know some of the things he's talking about were um were already litigated in court and lost so you know when he talks about the facebook money yeah that went to court and there was there's no state law that prevents communities from taking that money you know maybe there should be but there isn't that's what he's talking about apparently um again on another decision that was made by republicans on the election commission years ago and was true for the election in 2016 filling in you know the address say madison wisconsin on an outside of an envelope that was a unanimous decision everyone supported it it was true in 2016 when trump won wisconsin but now apparently that is suspicious scott mcdonnell the county clerk for dane county second largest county in wisconsin i know that this is an ongoing thing i'm going to ask you right now if you'll come back and keep us surprised as this thing continues to develop we're committed to covering these things even if other people aren't just because i do think that this is an important part of the way that our elections are being undermined and we're willing to tell the story until the until the bitter end yeah i'm with you all the way and and i think it's key that we speak out and at first we tried to ignore it and hope it went away that that's not happening exactly exactly scott mcdonnell thank you very much for your time thanks for your work appreciate it we've got some breaking news for you this hour um as you know on friday a conservative dominated federal appeals court let texas put its abortion ban back in place we reported that live on friday night during our hour here on the air um the abortion ban had been blocked for a few days at the justice department's request the doj is suing texas to overturn its abortion ban a federal judge had agreed to temporarily stop the ban from being implemented while doj was pursuing that challenge but then friday night the very conservative 5th circuit u.s court of appeals basically unblocked it which put the ban back in place essentially once again ending access to legal safe abortion in texas for a second time well now we're waiting to see if that decision will be reversed again if the ban will go back on ice since we have been on the air this hour the justice department has submitted its arguments against texas abortion ban to the fifth circuit and they don't hold back they called the texas abortion ban an assault on the rights of texas's citizens they call it an open threat to the supremacy of the federal constitution they say the state of texas does not even attempt to defend the ban's constitutionality in this court well now the court has those arguments from doj that again again gone in this hour the fifth circuit will have to decide whether or not the law stays in effect or once again whether it gets stopped but either way women's rights in texas are getting turned off and on like a light switch while this fight heads toward the united states supreme court this time the fight for abortion rights will help will happen before a unequivocally and unshielded um anti-abortion rights majority on the supreme court that'll have the full four the full full power of the united states justice department arguing for those rights for now the protections of roe vs wade remain effectively dead in the state of texas but we're continuing to follow this every step of the way stay with us [Music] you

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Keywords: MSNBC, MSNBC latest, Politics, News, adam schiff, rachel maddow, maddow, election audit, rober mueller, adam schiff book, trump impeachment, donald trump, texas, doj

Id: 2cxjZRMGl5E

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2021