CNN "Newsroom" - Transcript Interview with Ruben Gallego

Interview

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SCIUTTO: Joining us now to discuss this and other issues, Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego. He's also a member of the Armed Services Committee, and a veteran himself.

Congressman, thanks so much for taking the time this morning.

REP. RUBEN GALLEGO (D-AZ), ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

SCIUTTO: So let's begin if I can, just very briefly, how concerning is it to you that there were instances where the President's own advisors had no idea what the President might do, and took the step of warning their counterparts about that?

GALLEGO: What's very dangerous -- when you're dealing with your allies and even your enemies, you actually need to be at least somewhat transparent, be predictable, because the worst thing that could happen is you could have either your allies or your enemies do a miscalculation, which could really easily strip us into either war or into a very bad situation that we will -- would be very difficult for us to recover especially when it comes to vis-a-vis holding our alliances together.

SCIUTTO: Yes, yes, the war you don't want.

I want to move on to an issue that I know is close to your heart. And that is the deployment of U.S. forces in Europe. The U.S. is now moving ahead with the President's order to significantly reduce the U.S. presence in Germany. You're pursuing legislation to block that move. Where does it stand? Do you have bipartisan support?

GALLEGO: I actually had very strong bipartisan support. I introduced an amendment to the defense budget this year, this coming year's defense budget that passed with overwhelming numbers of Democrats and Republicans and then passed out of the House.

So right now we have to go to conference committee negotiate with the Senate Republicans on it. But I think at the end of day, we're going to win this issue. Democrats and Republicans realize how important, strategic important it is for us to have our troops positioned in Germany. They're not just there to protect Germany. They're actually there more than anything else, protect us.

And it's a vital link to the Middle East, it's a vital link to Africa. If you talked to many Iraq War veterans, it was a stop on the way in. And sometimes, unfortunately, it was stopped on the way out if they were injured.

SCIUTTO: The President claims this is about national security. It's about strategy. It's about moving troops around the world. Do you believe that justification?

GALLEGO: No. I've sat in some classified briefings and some unclassified briefings about where they're going to move these troops. It doesn't make sense.

If you're trying to keep a deterrent force on -- in Europe, especially in, you know, Western Europe, where they want to move these troops is not going to encourage any type of our age in any way our NATO allies to trust that we're going to be there in case --

SCIUTTO: Yes.

GALLEGO: -- the balloon goes up. If anything, it's a great signal and a great gift to Russia that we are pulling further back, and that their aggression may not be met by a united front from NATO.

Strategically, I don't see where that is coming from.

SCIUTTO: And Kremlin was the only one to celebrate the move, frankly, none of the US allies did.

I want to move on to China, I can.

GALLEGO: Yes.

[09:45:00]

SCIUTTO: As you're aware, the President has now issued Executive Orders banning social media apps, not just TickTok but also WeChat, these are huge followings around the world, particularly in China. Is this a genuine national security threat in your view?

GALLEGO: It may be like there are a lot of ways that we can actually stop TikTok from taking personal information and using the Chinese. But what they like to do is gather as much information for further use in the future.

But, we really want to talk about national security threat. This President also basically gave away our fight when it came to Huawei and ZTE. True national Chinese telecoms that we know are involved in espionage, that we know will -- can potentially be used as back end attack methods by the Chinese government and spy agencies.

And the President last time he met with President Xi Jinping did not push back on Huawei. Actually gave in a lot when it came to actually our insistence that Huawei and ZTE be totally separated?

So, what bothers me is that I think he is more bothered by the fact that TikTok is used as a social media platform to attack him --

SCIUTTO: Yes.

GALLEGO: -- and not the fact that Huawei and ZTE, which we know are aggressively used by the Chinese government is used to extend the Chinese sphere of influence when it comes to government operations.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Yes.

GALLEGO: And that's what where we should be focusing on. But again, this is all about him and not about the national security of this country.

SCIUTTO: We should note that TikTok, a lot of users use that to fool the President's campaign regarding the Tulsa rally, to fool them into believing many more people were coming, whether that drove the decision, we don't know, but something to throw out there.

Finally, before I go, President continues to attack mail-in voting only in states run by Democrats, by the way, totally fine in states run by Republicans such as Florida.

The Postmaster General today, Louis DeJoy, he says the U.S. mail will not delay mail-in ballots. Do you believe that promise given the relationship between the Postmaster General and the President and broader efforts to suppress the vote?

GALLEGO: Absolutely not. Everything we see right now, you know, in regards to this President elections that he wants to make this election as difficult as possible for people to vote, and in the middle of a pandemic. And then he has sliding rules where if you're a red state, and you already have early voting, and he thinks is going to benefit him, he'll say that OK, that state is good, but other states are bad.

Look, we've been voting in Arizona for more than 30 years by VPM, vote by mail. It's safe, it's secure, and it's used by both partisan -- wide bipartisan support.

If you need to suppress the vote to win an election, you probably should not be present. And I think that's a good message that the President should think about

SCIUTTO: Yes. Even conservative commentators, George Will, for instance, drew attention to these efforts.

Congressman Ruben Gallego, thanks very much for joining us this morning.

GALLEGO: Thank you.

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