Interview With Rep. Mark Meadows (R) North Carolina
BASH: Welcome back to STATE OF THE UNION. Attorney General William Barr is at the Justice Department. He headed back to the office after spending many hours, nine to be exact there on Saturday pouring over the Mueller report. Barr hopes to send the top line conclusions to Congress as soon as today. And as we wait, I want to go to one of the president's closest allies on Capitol Hill Republican representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina. He is the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. Thank you so much, sir, for joining me this morning. The president has been --</s>REP. MARK MEADOWS, (R) NORTH CAROLINA: Great to be with you, Dana.</s>BASH: The president has been uncharacteristically quiet on matters of substance since the Mueller report was submitted. You're close with him. What is he saying about it so far?</s>MEADOWS: Well, I think everybody is waiting to see what the final report is today when Attorney General Barr comes out. I do want to compliment the attorney general. When he got the report, within minutes literally he notified Congress, not just on one aspect, but on another aspect key to this whole thing, is the fact that President Trump did put his hand and pressure them to look the other way and that there was no really involvement with regards to DOJ impeding the Mueller investigation. So, I think both of those things were key. But I think everybody is waiting to see what the facts are today.</s>BASH: Congressman, the president and allies like yourself have been relentlessly attacking the Mueller probe now for two years trying to erode its credibility. How do you come back from that if the Mueller report is indeed something that clears the president or at least comes close to that?</s>MEADOWS: Well, I don't think the Mueller report should have been really something we're discussing today. I don't think there should have been a special prosecutor. I've been consistent with that since day one. We know that there was bias at the Department of Justice early on. In fact they were talking about a special prosecutor before James Comey was fired. And yet here we are today some 22 months later talking about something after spending tens of millions of dollars on a narrative that Democrats put forth. They said that this president colluded with the Russians. In fact some even went as far as to say he was an agent of Russia which is just ludicrous. And yet here we are today trying to make sense of an investigation that happened 22 months into it. We need to go after the bad guys which is Russia and not the president of the United States.</s>BASH: But will you -- will you concede that it would be inconsistent when this report comes out for Republicans to talk about it vindicating the president any way shape or form if they called it a witch hunt and called it not necessary and all the things you just said?</s>MEADOWS: I don't know how it could be inconsistent. We said there was no collusion. In fact, I've come on your show before to say that there's not any collusion. And yet Sunday after Sunday Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler and others said, oh, there's evidence, there's collusion. And yet what we find is an independent investigator has said that there's going to be no indictments. You can't have it both ways. I've been consistent saying the president didn't collude and now it appears that the facts will support that assumption.</s>BASH: We should remind our viewers that we don't know what's in this report yet. And that's very important.</s>MEADOWS: Well, we do know that there's no indictments coming, Dana.</s>BASH: That's true.</s>MEADOWS: I mean, because we do know that. And so if there was collusion either Bob Mueller decided not to actually prosecute somebody with evidence being there which I find hard to believe that that would happen.</s>BASH: Well, that's true -- listen, that's true for Don Jr. That's true for Jared Kushner. DOJ guidelines as you know very well say that you shouldn't and can't indict a sitting president. So the indictment doesn't necessarily mean that we're not going to see intense criticism in the Mueller report, which bring me to my next question which is, you voted --</s>MEADOWS: Sure.</s>BASH: -- on a resolution to release the Mueller report this past week, or two weeks ago. So given that, would you support a subpoena, if necessary, to get the attorney general to completely release and be transparent with the Mueller report?</s>MEADOWS: Well, I don't know that we're going to need a subpoena. Because Attorney General Barr has indicated he's going to do as much as he possibly can within the confines of the law to not only inform Congress, but inform the American people. So everybody talking about a subpoena, I find that really rich when we're talking about transparency. And some of the very people that are talking about a subpoena, Dana, are the ones who didn't want anyone to know that Fusion GPS was actually hired to dig up dirt on the president. They didn't want the Nunes memo released. I was one of the few that said release the Republican memo and release the Democratic memo.</s>BASH: Yes --</s>MEADOWS: And so when -- listen, transparency is good for everybody. I believe that we need to protect the innocent here. But to the extent that we cannot sacrifice national security interest and release as much information as possible, I certainly support that.</s>BASH: You support it. And you're close with the administration. Are you confident that they will actually do that?</s>MEADOWS: Yes, I'm confident that Attorney General Barr is really going to look at releasing as much as he possibly can within the confines. Rod Rosenstein who you know I'm not a big fan of said it many, many months ago is typically prosecutors do not release information that would be harmful to the innocent. There was an old Jack Webb "Dragnet," the names have been changed to protect the innocent. We need to make sure that we protect the innocent here, but at the same time be transparent and make sure that the American people know the truth. And when they know the truth, they will see this president did not collude with the Russians on -- to affect the election in 2016.</s>BASH: Congressman, you talked about Congress and the Democratic led House and their investigations. Put that aside for a second. My last question for you is this, the president's own Justice Department separate from Mueller also is continuing to investigate lots of aspects of Trump world, whether it's the inauguration, his charitable foundations, businesses, do you think those investigations are legitimate?</s>MEADOWS: I think a lot of those are not legitimate. I think what we've done is we've thrown as much at the wall as we possibly can to make it as difficult on this administration and try to distract. Certainly if there's wrong doing, no one is above the law, including the president of the United States. But what we see is a pattern of harassment. When Jerry Nadler puts out and said we want to investigate 81 different things, if we had done that to the previous administration they would be crying foul everywhere. And yet we see that this is just a large dragnet trying to find something to investigate. You need to look at the crime and investigate the crime, not go out and use the power of the government to drudge up some kind of wrong doing.</s>BASH: Congressman Mark Meadows, thank you so much for joining me this morning. I appreciate it.</s>MEADOWS: Thank you, Dana.</s>BASH: No more indictments in the Mueller probe. People around the president are applauding that. But what does it really mean? We're going to go behind the scenes with the former independent counsel. That's next.