Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said the Democrats report from the House Intelligence Committee investigation will “show the facts supporting the issue of collusion” between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Partial transcript as follows:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let’s get more on this now from the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee Congressman Adam Schiff. Congressman, thank you for joining us this morning.
As we’ve been talking here this morning, the president has continued his series of tweets. I want to put up the latest one, latest attack on Robert Mueller. “Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrat, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, zero Republicans. Another Dem recently added. Does anyone think this is fair? And yet there is no collusion.”
Of course, Robert Mueller himself was a registered Republican.But we’ve seen this series of tweets right now, the statement from the Trump lawyer suggesting the entire investigation should be shut down. What would happen if the president made that move?
REP. ADAM SCHIFF, (D) CALIFORNIA: Well, I would hope that it would prompt all Democrats and Republicans in the House to pass an independent counsel law and reinstate Bob Mueller. This would undoubtedly result in a constitutional crisis and I think Democrats and Republicans need to speak out about this right now. I think, George, you just pointed to the single most important development of the week and that is at the same time it’s revealed that the special counsel is looking at business records of the Trump organization, and I’ve always thought the money laundering issue was the most serious, you have the president through his lawyer trying to shut down the Mueller investigation and speaking out against special counsel.
Members need to speak out now. Don’t wait for the crisis but I would hope that that would be the result that we would affirm our system of checks and balances and appoint an independent counsel.
STEPHANOPOULOS: President also continually repeating there was no collusion during the campaign in the tweets over the last 48 hours. Of course, that is the conclusion of the Republicans of the House Intelligence Committee this week as well.
I know you dispute that, but will a report by the Democrats be able to demonstrate that collusion did, in fact, take place?
SCHIFF: Well, it certainly would be able to show the facts supporting the issue of collusion and the secret meetings all the lies about the secret meetings and putting them in their important context, the timing of these secret meetings. But there’s still a lot of investigative work to find the remaining pieces of the puzzle and the most significant part of the Republicans shutting us down is they’re preventing us from doing so.
We have never brought in George Padopoulos. We don’t know who he might have shared within the campaign the information that he got from the Russians. We don’t know whether that led to the Trump Tower meeting and the disappointment by the president’s son that he didn’t get stolen emails at that meeting. There are still a great many of unanswered questions that — and the Republicans have really prevented us and our committee from getting them. So that work has to be done.
But we will be reporting on what we have found and importantly what leads need to be pursued to give the American people the full picture.
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