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Maduro, Wife Plead Not Guilty To All Federal Charges. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired January 05, 2026 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:30:00]

JOHN MILLER, CNN CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Well, it tells us that this case, well, we got to go in sections. Now, there was a scramble over the weekend and I talked to some of these lawyers, I know lawyers were calling Elie Honig trying to figure out who they could hire for this case.

And this is the kind of thing, to quote Elie Honig, where you don't have President Maduro on the phone at the Metropolitan Detention Center going down the list of lawyers and calling down that list. This is being done by surrogate, so you have people who have associations with the government calling some of the top criminal defense lawyers around the city saying, what would it take to get you into this case?

The lawyers coming back with questions which is, well who's paying? Is it from the Maduro's funds, which could be seized by the government but they'll carve out for some for defense typically? Is it the government who's hiring us to represent the client?

Given the amount of discovery that we were just talking about in this case that's going to be turned over, whatever defense lawyer firm team takes this on, it's going to be a massive undertaking. So when you look at the two lawyers who are there today, Donnelly, a former federal prosecutor out of Houston representing the wife, Pollack representing President Maduro.

Pollack is a lawyer who's got criminal experience but he also, and this is key, has experience in these politically tinged, charged cases. And if you look at --

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: John --

MILLER: Yes, go ahead.

BASH: John, I'm sorry to interrupt you but I think --

MILLER: Yes.

BASH: -- you're going to find this interesting. As we -- as you were speaking, Pollack in this hearing said that there are issues with the legalities of his military abduction.

MILLER: Yes, so this is exactly where I was going. This case will go in these sections. First, before they get to anything about the charges or the evidence, they're going to attack the arrest and the legitimacy of his custody and whether or not he's a political prisoner and whether or not he is the sovereign leader of a sovereign country, which is in dispute.

The second thing will be that this case is not about the charges. It's about stealing oil from the poor Venezuelan people and that it's been engineered by the Trump administration. So after they attack the arrest, they'll attack the premise and that'll all be before stage three when they ever get to the evidence, which as Elie suggested, will all be about these are informants and paid liars and everybody has a reason to be here but you don't have me directly doing anything.

But those first two stages are going to be critical. They want to go through those before they ever consider getting to the actual evidence and the charges.

BASH: And John, I think you did a little bit of reporting on this over the weekend, but Pollack is now saying to the judge, quote, "There are some health and medical issues for Maduro that will require attention."

MILLER: Well, that's right. And there was -- when they landed at Stewart Air Force Base, they both got a medical assessment, but that got extended because Mrs. Maduro complained of some discomfort or if not, there was something that they found in the assessment where they had to extend that, bring her and her husband into the hangar.

So they're going to talk about those issues because --

BASH: Yes.

MILLER: -- that is also a pathway to get to better conditions either in that jail, being in the medical wing or to another facility.

BASH: Yes. And Mark Donnelly, who is his wife, Cilia Flores's attorney, just said that as you can see, which I'm not sure visibly what you can see and we'll hear from our reporters in there, that she sustained significant injuries during her abduction and he suggested she may have a fracture or severe bruising on her ribs and would need a physical evaluation.

All right, John, stand by please because I do want to go back to Evan who's at the courthouse. Evan, what are you hearing there?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, that's one of the things, certainly the raising of the injuries to Cilia Flores, Maduro's wife, Dana, really does open the door to where we think this is going to go next with the attorneys who will argue that the MDC, which is the federal lockup across the river in Brooklyn, is not the appropriate place for these people to be held.

Now, you know, there's a playbook here that is available and that is one that Manuel Noriega's legal team took more than 30 years ago when he was similarly brought to the United States to bring -- to face charges of drug trafficking and so on. And one of the things that he was able to get was better conditions for his detention. And so one of the things that I think, you know, Barry Pollack and Mark Robinson will make the argument for will be for exactly that, for them to be moved from a facility that is notorious. It is a place that is not a very -- is not -- even the Justice Department says it has a lot of problems.

And so, as you can see there, this is moving very quickly now. The judge appears to be saying that the next hearing here will be in March and so there'll be an intervening period here in the intervening months.

[12:35:08]

You'll see some of the motions from Barry Pollack, from Mark Robinson, to try to improve their conditions, to improve the way they're being treated essentially, especially if she has some injuries that have to be taken care of from a medical standpoint. And we also anticipate that they'll begin that process that John and Elie have laid out, which is to attack the basis for bringing him -- bringing them here to face these charges in New York.

You know, I've known Barry Pollack for many, many years. He doesn't mind representing unpopular clients. Julian Assange is one of them. And so that's -- you know, I think he is going to be a long-term part of this case because he has a lot of experience doing cases like this, Dana.

BASH: All right, Evan, thank you so much.

And back here, as Evan just mentioned, the hearing is now over and what the judge said is that the next time he will see them is March 17th. So we're talking more than two months.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Yes, so that's going to be time for the parties to start to go through that discovery, the evidence, to file their motions, a couple things just to follow up on. The health and medical issues are important here.

The MDC, the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in particular, are infamously horrible at handling inmate health problems. I had to deal with this, wrestle with this all the time. Whether those injuries, however serious they are, one of the goals of people in this situation is to get the heck out of the MDC because --

BASH: To go where.

HONIG: -- it is horrible. So there's a way -- there's a prison about 90 minutes north of the city and I think, Orange County called Otisville, which is --

BASH: Right.

HONIG: -- much better than the MDC. It's within driving distance of Manhattan. And so there is a move that I've seen lawyers make where they're trying to get their clients out of the hellhole that is the MDC and into the still horrible but less hellacious facility up at Otisville. There's better medical care there, so we'll see them.

Look, the Bureau of Prisons has an obligation to take care of prisoner health and safety and is really historically quite poor at it. But again, in this case, they better be on top of it.

ELLIOT WILLIAMS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: You know, it's funny, hearing both John and Evan, a couple -- one thing keeps coming up and yes, there are immensely complex legal questions around all of these national security and foreign sovereignty issues that you're going to see in some of these motions over the coming weeks.

Now, I don't want to say that anything in the law is ever simple or straightforward, but when you look at the actual criminal charges here, in the grand scheme of crimes and charges, these aren't that complex. And establishing a drug trafficking conspiracy really doesn't require all that much. It's really just, you know, was there drug trafficking and did the defendant, was he aware of it, and did he take actions and steps toward the furtherance of that conspiracy?

Now, that can be being aware of the things that we were talking about, you know, taking steps such as, you know, paying for these diplomatic passports and so on. There are far more complex crimes and, you know, of the many, many crimes that America has, these are actually quite simple, even if consequential and important and heady.

BASH: And Brett, I want to bring you in on the argument that Barry Pollack, Maduro's attorney, made about the legality of the way that this defendant was brought before this judge, meaning the military operation to do so. I would imagine that that argument is something that, if you were still inside the White House working for this president or any president, you would have thought through before this military action.

BRETT MCGURK, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Yes, and I have to defer to my legal colleagues, but in a normal course, an Article 3 court would defer to the opinion of the executive branch under Article 2 in the State Department of whether or not he is the legitimately serving president and thus entitled to immunity. They, ordinarily, that would be, I think, courts will defer to the executive branch.

BASH: Well, there's immunity and then there's the legality of the way that he was brought in. Are those two different issues or the same?

MCGURK: They're distinct. Yes.

HONIG: They're distinct. And to Brett's point, there's a little bit of law in this, not a lot. Some of it comes from the Noriega prosecution. It's surprisingly -- the law is surprisingly permissive of this type of arrest. There is a Supreme Court case that says even if a person is essentially kidnapped in his own foreign country and brought into the United States, that does not mean we dismiss the indictment.

As to the immunity point, I think you're right and Brett's right, the courts are generally going to defer to the president, the executive branch. If the executive branch says, we don't recognize this person as the president of this nation, I don't know a single district court judge alive who's going to say, yes, but I know better and I overrule you on that.

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Elie, is that could be one of the first things they rule on?

HONIG: Yes, yes. The motions -- and we got a preview of this just now, they do intend, the defendants do intend to bring these motions arguing that their arrests were illegal, infringed on the sovereignty of a nation, and that they have this immunity. That'll be among the first bucket of issues decided.

[12:40:03]

BASH: Yes. And clearly, if you are Maduro, who is a politician, what he wants the headline to be from the few times he spoke was --

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I am the president of Venezuela.

BASH: -- I am a decent man and I am still the president of Venezuela.

HOLMES: Yes, and I actually wanted to bring the conversation back to Delcy Rodriguez, just to some of the points --

BASH: Yes.

HOLMES: -- that Brett made, because we have been doing this extensive reporting for the last several months on what exactly the administration was going to do the day after. And as you said, it became pretty clear that they didn't have a fully baked plan.

One of the things that was interesting, though, was this idea of administrative stability. The idea that despite all of the things that President Trump has said about Maduro being illegitimate, that he never won an election, talking about the opposition, the idea was always, or at least in recent days, going to be focused on the vice president becoming the acting president.

One of the reasons was that they actually liked the way that she had handled oil, that she knew exactly what she was doing there. The other part of this is this idea of her working with the administration. I will remind you that despite the fact that Maduro is saying, I'm still the president, and that she came out swinging saying that, she backed away from that pretty quickly. She is now the acting president.

After saying it was a brutal and savage attack, she came back and said --

BASH: Said what she had to say.

HOLMES: -- we are going to cooperate with the United States. We invite them to cooperate. And President Trump described the call between Marco Rubio and Rodriguez as cordial.

BASH: Right. So the --

RAJU: But the challenge is not keeping them in, it's in the administration. If the administration backs that, they're essentially backing the Maduro regime staying --

BASH: Right.

RAJU: -- in power, despite the fact that she also is --

HOLMES: She is handpicked by Maduro. But I think --

RAJU: Right.

HOLMES: -- what they would say is that they do not want to see the kind of chaos that bringing in a completely new government --

BASH: Right. I mean --

HOLMES: -- would cause, because guess who's going to get blamed for that?

BASH: Right.

HOLMES: President Trump.

BASH: Totally different situation, but lesson learned from places like Iraq.

MCGURK: Security comes first, so you want to keep the security apparatus intact, even as you go through a transition. And I think that is a key assumption of what they're trying to do, and that keeping the regime apparatus intact keeps the security services intact. But again, if we're here a year from now, and the Maduro regime is basically the government of Venezuela, you have to ask what has really been achieved.

BASH: Yes.

KYLIE ATWOOD, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: It's also worth noting that the Secretary of State over the weekend essentially cast this as a relationship of necessity and convenience. It wasn't as if he was saying the administration has been working for months, and we chose Delcy Rodriguez. He effectively said, we're talking to her. We're going to see how this goes, and we're going to judge whether or not we can work with her based on her actions, not what she's saying.

BASH: OK, and here's another question I think a lot of people are wondering, and I don't think we know the answer to this yet. What kind of deal was cut?

HOLMES: Well, that's a speculation.

BASH: Beforehand.

HOLMES: That's all --

BASH: Between -- and when I say that, I mean between the Trump administration and Delcy Rodriguez.

HOLMES: That's the speculation that you're seeing everywhere. We don't have any details into that.

BASH: Right.

HOLMES: But I will tell you this, that after she came out swinging, saying that this was a savage and brutal attack, saying Maduro was the real president, we talked to a number of sources immediately afterwards saying, well, how's this going to work? You know, she doesn't seem very happy.

And the U.S. officials that we talked to seemed very confident --

BASH: Yes.

HOLMES: -- in the fact that she was going to work with the United States government. They were essentially saying what you just said, which was, she had to say that. She's -- this is rhetoric right now, but let's see what happens.

RAJU: And maybe that's why Trump undercut the opposition leader, Machado, who --

BASH: Big time. Yes.

RAJU: -- would obviously widely supported.

BASH: I want to get back to New York because Laura Coates is now with us. Laura, you were in the courtroom. Take it away.

LAURA COATES, CNN ANCHOR & CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: This was unbelievable to watch. Nicolas Maduro walk into a courtroom here in the United States of America. He had on tan pants. He had an orange, almost scrub-like prison garb, and then he had a blue shirt on top of that, covered and appeared to be sort of a white lint of some kind.

He walked in. He is very tall. He stood next to his attorneys. He was flanked by two of them. His wife on the other side of her. She had visible injuries in terms of bandages on her right temple and on her forehead as well. Both of them appeared to be a little bit stoic and also having difficulty sitting and getting up from their chairs.

Nicholas Maduro in particular had to brace himself on either side of the arm of his chair to lower his body, which is very particularly tall. During that, there was an opportunity for him to speak to the judge. The judge asked him whether he in fact was Nicolas Maduro Moros and asked him to identify himself, which is totally routine anytime someone goes for a court to be presented.

This was the opportunity that what he says to be the president of Venezuela began to speak. He did not just state his name. He described himself as a prisoner of war, talked about having been captured from his home in Venezuela, saying that he is still the president of that country.

The judge interrupted him and told him there'll be plenty of time to describe the legality of the removal from your home and also, of course, about your defenses. Right now, I just want you to tell me whether or not you are Nicolas Maduro Moros, to which he said, Soi Nicolas Maduro Moros.

[12:45:08]

At that point in time, he was also offered the opportunity to have all the charges read to him. He said he wanted to do it personally. I should tell you, Dana, he was taking copious notes throughout this. By the time the judge even asked about the first count, he was nearly to the end of his legal pad.

He was speaking to his attorney. He had a headset on, him and his wife, for a translator and interpreter to be able to communicate with him. I will note at one point in time, there was a moment when he responded to the judge directly without having first been translated, presumably that he may have understood, particularly in English.

I also note that during the conversation, he would look over to his wife, who, as I mentioned, had bandages on her temple and also to her forehead. That was referenced by her own attorney when they're talking about medical attention.

He asked about whether or not he had -- whether he was an innocent man. He asked if he was going to plead guilty or not guilty, at which point in time. He's described he was innocent, not guilty and that he was a decent man, he said, and still president of his country.

His wife, saying that she is the first lady of the Republic of Venezuela. I'll note their hands. When Maduro spoke quite confidently, he would have his fingertips touching the desk. Meanwhile, his wife had her hands almost in the fist, much more demure, much more withdrawn in many respects.

And then he described again that he was innocent, not guilty and have done anything mentioned in the indictment to which the wife also said she was no (foreign language), not guilty, completely innocent. It was a request by both to visit the consular and have those visits actually there as well.

And also, Maduro said he had one request. He wanted to have his notes respected and to be able to retain them as well. And then, Dana, there was a moment at the end of this when our own Gordon Ebach (ph), who is a news associate, was leaving the courtroom. He witnessed a protester get up as they were escorting Maduro and his wife out of the courtroom.

And apparently, that protester said that you will pay for what you have done to Maduro --

BASH: Wow.

COATES: -- who in turn pointed to the sky and said that he was a man of God and the president of the Republic of Venezuela.

BASH: Wow. That sounds like a moment.

Real quick before I let you go, I just wanted -- because you have a perch that we didn't have. Can you quickly just describe his tone of voice, his facial expressions, his demeanor?

COATES: Maduro was assertive. He was confident. His voice was loud, and he was quite intentional about every word he was saying. He wanted to describe what he perceives as a heightened indignity. It hadn't been removed from his home and having been captured, describing himself as a prisoner of war.

He also was quite clear about not wanting to have the indictment read publicly, wanting to read it personally and also said that he want -- he was really orchestrating. We spoke to his attorney. He was running the show. He also would tap on the attorney for his wife and do kind of like a come here sort of sign, and he would lean over and then he would write things --

BASH: Yes.

COATES: -- and show them.

BASH: Well --

COATES: -- he was in control in that room.

BASH: He is used to being a dictator of a country, so that kind of makes sense.

Laura, thank you so much. What terrific reporting. It's so great to have you there. I really appreciate it.

And speaking of somebody great to have, Fareed Zakaria is here now. Fareed, I'm so glad you're here because I just want you to pull this out to 30,000 feet as you are so wonderful at doing about what the impact of what we're seeing now in the courtroom is really having, if any, on the state of the government in Venezuela right now.

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST, FAREED ZAKARIA GPS: Well, I think that the government in Venezuela is clearly trying to decide whether or not there's a way that it can stay in power. It can maintain the entire repressive apparatus. It can run the country as its personal property, as has been going on for two decades now, and make some concessions to the United States to get the U.S. off its back.

Because one thing is clear, Donald Trump is not going to send in tens of thousands of Americans to occupy and run Venezuela. So he's subcontracting that to the current government. The current government will be in charge. They will be in charge day to day. They will have all their people there.

You know, it's basically going to be the same dictatorship. And then the question is, what kind of concessions do they have to make? It's pretty vague in terms of what Trump is asking for. Let American companies back into the oil industry.

[12:50:05]

Frankly, there had been talk about doing that anyway, because the Venezuelan oil industry is in very bad shape. American companies would be willing to go in. It'd be a lot of investment for them. Not clear what the reward will be in the short term.

So it's -- you know, it's probably a situation where they're thinking to themselves, maybe we can make this all work out, and we still get to keep Venezuela and run it as, you know, as a dictatorship, because nothing Trump has said suggests that they are trying in any way to bring freedom or liberty or democracy to Venezuela.

BASH: Right.

ZAKARIA: They just essentially arrested one guy --

BASH: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- in what is probably the most expensive arrest in human history.

BASH: Yes, yes, it's so true. And, you know, if you look at the last 30 years of anything that's even closely analogous, you do hear American leaders, presidents talking about democracy, and we've almost not heard that at all, which I think is a really important point.

The president, the U.S. President Trump is very aggressively warning other Latin American nations, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, he's saying that he's not as interested in. We'll talk about that in a second. But what do you make of those threats? Are they real, or is it just part of the -- almost part of the perp walk that we saw from Maduro, just a way of deterrence and show of power?

ZAKARIA: Oh, no, I think that -- I think it's all real. Look, Trump, I think, really does buy into this idea that the United States should be master of the Western Hemisphere. This is its sphere of influence in a strange way. That is an extraordinary retreat because the U.S. has been the global hegemon, the global superpower. It has had interests all over the world.

Trump is, in a way, shrinking us to the -- to this hemisphere and saying, and here we're going to be -- you know, we're going to be the dominant power. Now, the challenge will be that in a place like Mexico, Colombia, which are both democracies, both allies of the United States, the difficulty they have in interdicting the drug trade is a combination of, you know, do they really have the ability to do it?

Does the Mexican state have the ability? Is there too much corruption, inefficiency, locals paying off each other? You know, in Colombia we fought for 15 years with some success, but it took an enormous amount of time and effort and work. It's not as though Colombia or Mexico can turn a switch and suddenly the drug trade to the United States will stop.

Remember --

BASH: That's right.

ZAKARIA: -- America is the richest country in the world. It has an insatiable demand for drugs. In those circumstances, as any market economist will tell you, somebody will provide the supply. And that is the story of America's drug wars is we keep wanting the stuff.

First, it came out of Miami. We tried to shut it down there. Then went to Panama. We invaded Panama in a very similar situation, arrested the president. The drugs moved to Colombia. We fought for 15 years in Colombia.

BASH: Right.

ZAKARIA: It moved to Mexico. So as long as Americans want to consume drugs, somebody is going to supply them.

BASH: Yes. And you heard the president say point blank that he thinks that even though he likes Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, it's the cartels that are running the country.

I just want to say that what we see on the screen now, we believe that is Maduro and his wife leaving the courthouse in New York. The hearing ended about 10 minutes ago. We're just going to watch this video as he leaves and goes back to the prison where he is, that his lawyers are fighting at least to change because of the conditions there and the argument that they made about Cilia Flores about her condition.

As we watch that -- Fareed, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. I know you'll be on more throughout the day.

Back here at -- in the studio, we have Congressman Pat Ryan with us. Thank you so much for being here. Appreciate it. You are an Iraq war veteran, two tours, two combat tours. And I know that you have been making the analogy like other Democrats, not Republicans, but Democrats who are Iraq war veterans between the notion of going in for regime change in Iraq and what happened there and Venezuela.

There are obviously a lot of differences like the military is. It was one and done in -- even though there's a lot of military --

REP. PAT RYAN (D), NEW YORK: So far --

BASH: So far. A lot of naval assets outside in the waters around Venezuela. But what is your sense of looking at what we're seeing now with what you think should happen next in Venezuela?

[12:55:13]

RYAN: Well, history doesn't repeat to your point, but it certainly rhymes. The fact that the president last night on Air Force One admitted that oil executives were informed of this, I think, illegal action before the Congress of the United States that represents the people, not just that it's the Congress, we represent the people, especially in the House of Representatives, is incredibly dangerous.

I mean, the fact that folks who clearly didn't have a clearance knew about this, and yet the representatives of the people weren't given a voice is outrageous. What the president said in that briefing at 11:00 a.m. after the operation and then double down, triple down again on last night that, quote unquote, "the U.S. is running the country, "that exactly echoes the rhetoric that was used leading up to during and throughout not one but two forever wars that the American people do not want.

If there's one thing that I know my constituents and people across the country do not want, it's these open ended conflicts with no plan. They clearly have no plan. And so I think it's important, regardless of party, whether you're elected official or not, that the American people say we do not want another forever war for oil and money.

BASH: You know, Marco Rubio was on TV yesterday, and he was answering some criticisms like yours, saying that there's a phobia built up about this sort of thing because the focus is on the Middle East, which is a very different dynamic than the Western Hemisphere. He's saying, you know, Venezuela doesn't look like Libya. It doesn't look like Iraq. It doesn't look like Afghanistan. And so the analogy is wrongheaded.

RYAN: The same things were said. I remember it was a cadet at West Point in the lead up to the war in Iraq. The same things were said about Vietnam when comparisons were made in a similar way. It is such chicken hawk BS from Rubio, who's not served a single day in uniform, to dismiss that as a phobia.

You want to tell that to my friends on this bracelet that I lost in combat? You want to tell that to the innocent Iraqis that were killed? You want to tell that to the Venezuelan people who are saying, we're glad Maduro's gone, as am I, but what the heck is the plan afterwards? And are we just going to hand this to another dictator who's going to do the will of our increasingly authoritarian president in Donald Trump?

BASH: I do want to quickly because you talked about oil and the president talked about oil a lot and just to play the devil's advocate on oil. I mean, Venezuela's economy has been decimated, and the country sits on about 303 billion barrels worth of crude oil. The U.S. does have the ability to help rebuild that. Should it?

RYAN: The core question here is, what do we want to do in this country with our blood and treasure? Our taxpayer dollars that everybody works hard for and our young men and women in uniform. Do we want to start more regime change oil focused wars, or do we actually want health care for the American people?

Do we want infrastructure that works? We want education that works. That's the choice that was just made with no consultation by the people or the Congress on January 3rd that many of us woke up to that morning. I'm watching with my four and six-year-old boys and my six- year-old son's asking me, why are we bombing another country?

And I -- there's no good answer for that. I really don't think there is. And I fear that this is just the beginning that because there isn't a plan, because we still have an entire carrier strike group and nearly 20,000 service members there, and the president's been clear he's OK with boots on the ground apparently. Again, despite him being a five-time draft dodger saying that, the people do not support this. And we cannot get away from that. That's the key thing.

BASH: Manu, we have like about a minute left. I know you wanted to ask a question for the Congressman.

RAJU: Yes. Because you were in some of these past classified briefings, did they ever convey to you what the objective was or what did the administration say when they were talking about Venezuela and the ultimate goal?

RYAN: Well, one, we've had to fight to get any information from the administration, which defies the Constitution. Two, in the most recent classified briefing, which I was in and happened right before Christmas, Marco Rubio personally, explicitly lied. To me and the Congress and to the people's representatives, we asked over and over, what is the larger plan? Is there an effort at regime change being planned?

We know, given the sophistication of this operation, the reporting that's happened, that was well in the works. And I understand, very much understand the need for operational security. This is -- we have to get beyond that and recognize this is an act of war to say we're going to run another sovereign nation. And the people and the Congress have to be a part of that conversation.

BASH: Congressman, really appreciate you being here. Thank you all for rocking and rolling during this hour, during that really incredible hearing. Appreciate it.

Thank you for joining Inside Politics. CNN News Central starts right now.