Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff joined MSNBC Tuesday following an interview last weekend where he said he has every expectation that special counsel Robert Mueller will testify in front of the House Intel. Committee.
“This is going to happen, it has to” Schiff told Chris Hayes, “You have to start… with the man who did with the investigation.” The chairman made it clear that he did not find Attorney General William Barr’s interpretation of the Mueller report to align with the special counsel’s findings, and as a result, the American people need to hear directly from Mueller himself.
Schiff also admitted he is “profoundly concerned” with Barr’s presence in Trump’s re-election campaign, and that he never imagined that Barr "would be this awful" as attorney general.
“This attorney general now has this unified executive theory that he basically is the president's lawyer, to do the president’s bidding, and if that bidding includes shutting down the Mueller investigation, Barr says that would [be] perfectly fine.”
The California congressman told Hayes that despite the statutory requirement that declares the Judiciary Committee be kept informed of significant intelligence and counterintelligence activities, the committee has not been briefed since the firing of FBI Director James Comey over two years ago.
Although Schiff was hesitant to fully declare a constitutional crisis, he called it a “crisis of a different kind.” “I don’t think we’ve ever had our democracy so stressed as what we see from a president who has no respect for the separation of powers, no respect for the truth, and no moral character,”