Congressman Jim Himes on Trump's Disaster Policies
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What are Jim Himes' views on Trump's policies towards Ukraine?
I'm joined by Democratic Congress member Jim Hines, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. Congress member, given your position, the sensitive intelligence you see as a ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, I got to ask you your reaction to what we saw last week and frankly over the weekend with President Trump and his administration's attacks on President Zelensky of Ukraine.
Yeah, well, we're in a mighty weird world, right? And I mean, you can just see it out there. The Russians are thrilled. Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for Putin, is saying it looks like the United States and Russia are aligned now on our goals. Remember, this is the country that is responsible for 70,000 deaths in Ukraine that brutalized a struggling democracy. And we have always, certainly in my lifetime and well before, the United States has always stood with the good guys, right? You know, in 1941 and 1942 and World War II, we didn't say, oh, so many people are dying in France and the UK and Germany. And, you know, we should bring an end to this. We've always stood with the good guy. And right now you've got Donald Trump and his administration fighting.
trying to convince the American people, despite the civilian bodies you saw, the raped women, the children who were murdered in the town of Bucca, you've got the Trump administration trying to convince the Americans that this is some irrelevant conflict where we're just trying to stop the violence between two pesky combatants, right? We, for the first time in our history, in a major conflict, certainly in Europe, are trading our heritage of standing up for what is right and good and liberty in favor of Donald Trump's bizarre internal hatred for Ukraine in particular, but for anybody that it perceives as not powerful and strong, and that's radically changing the way our allies think about us, the way we're thinking about us, and it's just enormously concerning.
It's like, why is this even a question? How is this even a close call? Like Russia wants to destroy us. Ukraine is our ally. Like, what the heck are we even talking? Like, do you have that reaction sometimes? I mean, look, your committee in particular was a... was a very bipartisan community. Intelligence don't care if you're a Democrat, Republican or Independence, it's about keeping Americans alive or whether people are gonna be dead. That should be a bipartisan issue. But how are some of your colleagues? I mean, you gotta be looking at some of these people and being like, what are you doing? What are you doing?
Yeah, no, absolutely. And by the way, I'm going to struggle like crazy to make sure that the Intelligence Committee remains sort of not partisan, not caught up in the politics. You know, we we do a lot of stuff abroad, CIA, NSA, surveillance, counterterrorism. It's really important that we have oversight, even in a moment like this that is really fraught. But look, you know. Trump and his people, and by the way, almost all of my Republican colleagues here, with the startling exception of Lisa Murkowski, who stood up and said, this makes me sick to my stomach. Look, foreign policy can be complicated, but this is not complicated. When the Russian spokesman is saying we're excited by where the United States is, our goals are aligned, and the United Kingdom, with whom we have fought side by side since the Revolutionary War and all sorts of conflicts, when France, when our allies are saying the United States is gone, The United States is no longer the global leader.
When Russia is saying you're doing it all right and our allies are saying you're doing it all wrong, guess what? You're doing it wrong. And it's going to take a very long time, a very, very long time for the United States to reestablish what Reagan called a city upon a hill, what JFK in his 1961 inaugural address said we would pay any price, bear any burden for the survival of liberty. That is gone.
and you know it makes for a much apart from what it does to us our ethics our morality our values it makes for a much more dangerous world how do you exist in a bipartisan intelligence committee environment where the director of national intelligence is tulsi gabbard who goes out there every day and i mean this is what this is what peskov said yesterday And this is what RT wrote. The new U.S.
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