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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Impeachment Proceedings Go Public, and Republicans Go On the Attack
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Impeachment Proceedings Go Public, and Republicans Go On the Attack
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- [00:00]
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- [01:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and guests about politics. It's Friday, November 1st. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Yesterday, in a historic vote, the House endorsed the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, supporting a resolution that sets the terms for public hearings. They are expected to begin in a few weeks. The vote conveyed the near unanimous belief of House Democrats that Trump has committed impeachable offenses in his administration's interactions with Ukrainian officials. House Republicans voted as a bloc against the proceedings and and Representative Devin Nunes, ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, which will conduct the hearings, described the committee chair, Adam Schiff, as a cult leader who has been bouncing from one outlandish conspiracy theory to another. Last week, during a Cabinet meeting, Trump asked Republicans for just this kind of aggressive defense.
- [02:18]
Donald Trump
So this is a phony investigation. I watched a couple of people on television today talking about it. They were talking about what a phony deal it is, what a phony investigation it is, and the Republicans have to get tougher and fight. We have some that are great fighters, but they have to get tougher and fight because the Democrats are trying to hurt the Republican Party for the election, which is coming up.
- [02:41]
Dorothy Wickenden
Susan Glaser joins me from Washington to discuss the most important revelations from the closed door testimony of the past few weeks and what to expect as the impeachment hearings go public. Susan, welcome back.
- [02:55]
Susan Glaser
Oh, Dorothy, thank you so much.
- [02:57]
Dorothy Wickenden
I want to start with Devin Nunes, who will be one of the most vocal Republicans during the hearings. We maybe need to remind everyone who he is. Everything moves so quickly in politics these days. He did precede Schiff as chair of the Intelligence Committee, and he does have a penchant for conspiracy theories of his own. Wasn't he behind the bogus Uranium One idea, which accused Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Clinton foundation of conspiring with Russia in ways that I never could fully fathom? And he made that midnight run to the White House in 2017 to try to confirm Trump's claim that President Obama tapped his phones during the election.
- [03:37]
Susan Glaser
Well, that's right. Even the midnight run was too much for even Republicans. And actually he was temporarily forced to step aside and recuse himself as the Republican leader of the investigation into the Russian intervention because of that close ties to the White House. Look, there have always been conspiracy theories in American politics and conspiracy theorists even who end up in Congress. It's just that they didn't used to be committee chairs and ranking members. There would be one or two outlier type members. What's different now is the mainstreaming of this kind of conspiracy theory driven view. And in Devin Nunes case, it seems to have explicitly penetrated and worked in partnership with, with the Trump White House, which as you know, is also a font of this kind of misinformation in many ways. Actually, the Ukraine scandal that's now at the heart of this impeachment investigation is in and of itself a reflection of the president of the United States being captured by a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory about that it was somehow Ukraine rather than Russia, which intervened in the 2016 election.
- [04:46]
Dorothy Wickenden
You can totally understand why so many Americans just shut this out. But let's get back to the findings so far from the impeachment inquiries. So a month ago, the only information we had about the Ukrainian scandal was a detailed whistleblower's report and a rough transcript of Trump's July 25 call with the Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky. So remind us maybe first what the whistleblower alleged and what the phone call revealed, and then we can go on to what we've learned since essentially this.
- [05:20]
Susan Glaser
July 25th phone call between President Trump and President Zelensky immediately raised alarms inside the National Security Council and inside the US Government officials, a small circle who are responsible for dealing with American policy toward Ukraine and Russia. And so that, I think, was the proximate cause for the whistleblowers, reporters, that those concerns were being shared among the, that small group of people. And the whistleblower, as you know, came forward. But actually the complaint was not transmitted to Congress. Right away it went to the Justice Department. The White House found out about it. The CIA's inspector general said, hey, this is serious, incredible. We need to do something. And essentially it was being sat on. So it gets to Congress. This information is clearly alarming. It's clearly specific, it's clearly credible, and that's what triggered the investigation in the first place.
- [06:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
What have we learned since from the testimony of the diplomats and White House officials of the last two weeks?
- [06:23]
Susan Glaser
So what's really been striking is that essentially the congressional impeachment inquiry has pierced the veil of the Trump White House and the Trump State Department. Pentagon officials have been cooperating with his inquiry in the past. During the Mueller investigation, basically, Trump was more or less able to shut down cooperation with Congress. But many of these officials are career nonpartisan civil service, foreign service officers, and they've chosen to obey subpoenas and to appear before Congress. As a result of that, we have quite extensive information. And what it shows is a months long campaign by Donald Trump and his private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, essentially to subvert American policy toward Ukraine toward Trump's personal ends. And this was not just manifested in the phone call which we knew about originally, but it actually, it went on for quite a period of time. And there were a number of very specific actions which we now know were really directed by the President himself. That's the part I find so breathtaking. He personally fired the US Ambassador to Ukraine. And this was months ago, in the spring, at the behest of Giuliani.
- [07:38]
Dorothy Wickenden
That was Marie Yovanovitch.
- [07:40]
Susan Glaser
Exactly. And in many ways we were aware of that, although not so specifically Trump's role. And it was a red alarm. She's a very respected, nonpartisan professional. Giuliani was going on TV demanding her ouster, making all sorts of wild allegations that she was improperly pressuring Ukrainian officials or that she was somehow anti Trump. And he was on Fox News saying that. Then Donald Trump Jr. Was tweeting about her and demanding that she'd be fired. And then boom. So we knew something weird and inappropriate was going on in Some ways, that was the beginning of this whole thing, but people didn't pay that much attention.
- [08:22]
Dorothy Wickenden
You know, Trump has consistently and openly scorned the work of career diplomats. And one of the things I was struck by this past week was Lieutenant and others, too, obviously. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman appearing in full dress uniform. Very impressive history of service to the country. And he made an opening statement that seemed designed to remind Americans how he and other public servants see how they serve the country. And he said, I'm a patriot, and it is my sacred duty and honor to advance and defend our country, irrespective of party or politics. And it struck me that maybe we are now seeing, in part, the revenge of the civil servants, people who are now brave enough to come forward and say the president is wrong, and this is what the Americans need to know about what's going on behind the scenes.
- [09:16]
Susan Glaser
Yeah, no, I think that is a big and dramatic part of the story. That's something that we're seeing for the first time. Trump has essentially defined service in this administration as service to him personally, whereas these folks, and historically, they swear an oath to the Constitution and to the United States, not to the president as an individual. I think it's also important to remember that Trump and Giuliani were essentially at war with his own administration's policy in Ukraine. So one of the other major actions that he took, in addition to this phone call pressuring the Ukrainian president, was to hold up nearly $400 million in congressionally authorized military aid to Ukraine. And this was actually a major foreign policy win for the hawks inside the Trump administration. They have been crowing about it to people like me for the last several years, saying, look, we have a much better policy toward Russia than Barack Obama did. We've made this decision to send military aid to Ukraine, which Obama resisted doing. And now here is Trump unilaterally telling Mick Mulvaney, his acting White House chief of staff, to hold up the aid, even though there's no legal reason for doing so. And this is something that has come out in the testimony. Officials repeatedly asked questions about it. The Pentagon was concerned about it. They were afraid the money was gonna run. And officials were told at a meeting in July. When they asked, what's the reason, they said, we don't know, except that the president has personally demanded it. So that's another very significant thing, and I think it helps put the context here. Right. It's Trump and Giuliani trying to hijack this aid and use it as leverage for something that Trump wants for his own personal benefit.
- [11:04]
Dorothy Wickenden
And this, of course, is the source of outrage among all of these witnesses. So Trump fires Marie Yovanovitch, the US Ambassador to Ukraine. She is succeeded by William Taylor. Tell us about his testimony.
- [11:18]
Susan Glaser
He is now the acting ambassador to Ukraine. He was a former U.S. ambassador, career civil servant, again, foreign service officer. He was called back by the Trump administration. So Bill Taylor goes there, and what he immediately describes, according to his testimony, essentially is almost like the Twilight Zone. Something's wrong. For example, there's an official policy, and then there seem to be these, quote, three amigos, rogue actors, who were personally designated by the President to actually be in charge of Ukraine policy. And that includes Rick Perry, the Energy Secretary, the Ambassador to the European Union, where Ukraine isn't even a member of the European Union, Gordon Sondland, and then the special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker. So they're running this rump policy. And then there's Bill Taylor and his colleagues at the State Department and the White House trying to run the actual policy.
- [12:14]
Katie Drummond
What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global Editorial Director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that, that eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I.
- [12:48]
Susan Glaser
Try to be an antidote to the.
- [12:50]
Katie Drummond
Unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [13:25]
Dorothy Wickenden
What about the Ukraine scandal makes it worth pursuing as grounds for impeachment? And why are the Democrats limiting themselves to. To such a narrow focus?
- [13:34]
Susan Glaser
You know, Dorothy, I think this is an essential question and there are no easy answers. They've made a calculation that this is such a clear cut example, in their view of malfeasance and abuse of power, corruption of the office on the part of Trump that it's a story they thought that had a clear narrative and was so straightforward that nobody could defend it. I think that was their calculation. It's not yet clear by any means that this is the right decision, because there are so many other potential examples of very significant wrongdoing that they're not including in the scope of this. I think probably the most serious from the point of view of the constitutional sins, is profiting off of the office, which seems to be something that's actually explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. And yet Democrats, for now, are choosing not to pursue and incorporate the Mueller report and its acts of alleged obstruction of justice. Again, same thing. The whole reason the Mueller report didn't move forward with any action related to that is because it's only Congress that can do so. And yet Congress run by Democrats is throwing up its hands and saying, no, we're not going to do anything.
- [14:45]
Dorothy Wickenden
And in that sense, it's different from the Nixon inquiry, where they threw out a lot of issues to bring him down.
- [14:52]
Susan Glaser
Well, that's correct. Now, there was a big, robust debate in the end when they were formulating the articles of impeachment as to which offenses they would actually include in the articles. And they did exclude some scandals that were significant scandals. There was a price fixing, a milk price fixing scandal, for example, that they debated in the Judiciary Committee, and they ultimately did not include because their focus was to try to include things that directly went to Nixon's conduct in office. But of course, in Trump's case, most of these do bear on his conduct and in office. And that's in the end, what I think is so striking about this Ukraine story is that it both gets to the heart of what the founders were concerned about when they envisioned impeachment, which is the question of foreign influence in American politics and over our executive number one. Number two, this testimony has been so directly implicating the President himself in Nixon. You know, they spent basically two years debating what did the president know and when did he know it. In this particular case, basically, Donald Trump appears to have been directing the action that is just remarkable and actually more significant than what Nixon was charged with.
- [16:10]
Dorothy Wickenden
So in that sense, it does seem as though the Democrats may have made a shrewd decision in keeping the focus narrow. And also, it's interesting, Trump has focused so much on maintaining unified support among Republicans on the Hill. He seems not to have anticipated at all that any of the remaining members of his White House team would turn on him. And their stories are remarkably consistent. So I wonder whether, despite the Republican theatrics. We are certainly going to be seen. It isn't inevitable that the public phase is going to be very damaging as the wider public begins to tune in.
- [16:51]
Susan Glaser
I think it's not a foregone conclusion at this point. I really do. I am concerned that people are just overwhelmed by the Trump era and by so many different scandals. Can you even remember that this is the same week that not only was Baghdadi killed, but Donald Trump? The president made up a crazy story about Baghdadi whimpering and crying, which his own chairman of the Joint Chiefs and military officials have said there's no basis. We don't have that information, cuz we don't have it. I mean, this is unbelievable.
- [17:25]
Katie Drummond
Right.
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Susan Glaser
And so I'm very sympathetic to the idea that the public, even if it's trying to pay attention, may find itself losing the thread of this, number one. Number two, it's cooked into the politics. People seem shockingly immovable when it comes to their views of Donald Trump and sadly to the facts. I mean, what we've seen from Republicans on the Hill so far is either a refusal to engage with the facts or a simple inversion of reality in a way that I think is just deeply threatening to our democracy.
- [18:01]
Dorothy Wickenden
However, behind the bluster of congressional Republicans, I'm wondering, and you've been up on the Hill following this, how much panic you're sensing beneath what they're saying in public?
- [18:14]
Susan Glaser
You know, I'm not sensing panic. I mean, first of all, Republicans do have a playbook for dealing with this. And the playbook is pretty clear. It's stick together. And if you really do that, it's very, very hard for the other side to break you and you remarkable unanimity on the part of Republicans in this vote this week to move forward with the public face of the impeachment inquiry. This is a vote, by the way, which Republicans were demanding for several weeks, and yet when that time actually came, not a single one of them voted in favor of it. And so, you know, sticking together, number one. Number two, essentially the distortion of our geography and our political map means that there's disproportionate influence in those of those red states which are remain quite pro Trump, both in the House and in the Senate, where that is the base that the Republicans are concerned about keeping.
- [19:18]
Dorothy Wickenden
What sort of timeline are the Democrats now looking at for issuing the articles of impeachment?
- [19:24]
Susan Glaser
Well, they've said that they're moving very, very quickly, but these things always take longer. And so initially they were saying Thanksgiving and Senate trial Wrap it up this year. That's not going to happen. Now, it looks like they're aiming to try to get the House articles of impeachment voted on by Christmas and then have a Senate trial early in the new year. Now, that already makes this collide with the 2020 election year, which is one of the most striking between this and previous impeachments. Both Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon had already been reelected to a second term, so they were never going to face the voters again when the impeachment proceedings came up against them. Now, Donald Trump is the first president to face this kind of impeachment proceeding while also facing the voters. The Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary essentially are now going to collide in time, basically, with this Senate trial. So that's just so disruptive.
- [20:24]
Dorothy Wickenden
And what do you think it would take for Republicans to break ranks? This must be posing a real moral crisis for a number of them.
- [20:33]
Susan Glaser
You know, Donald Trump has been a moral crisis in general for the Republican Party. But what's happened is essentially he succeeded a party that was basically united against him three years ago, has been the subject of a hostile and successful takeover. And essentially those who decided to criticize him found that they needed to leave the party or find work elsewhere, people like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker. So right now, there isn't a lot of appetite or the kind of people who would take Yamad when Mitt Romney stepped up to be critical of Trump in the wake of these revelations about Ukraine coming up, Trump hit him back very hard. And, you know, not a single other Republican member of the Senate came forward to defend their colleagues. There is a view in Washington right now, it is widely held view, I think it's more or less correct, that were there to be a secret ballot in the Senate that many, many senators, more than the 20 needed to convict him, would vote to convict him. But in a public trial, people remain extremely dubious. You know, one formulation that I've heard from people again and again is essentially they'll either be 35 votes to convict Trump or two and not much in between. And I think that's probably accurately sums up where we are right now.
- [21:55]
Dorothy Wickenden
So they'd rather be reelected than fulfill their constitutional duties as senators?
- [22:01]
Susan Glaser
Yes, in a nutshell.
- [22:03]
Dorothy Wickenden
Okay.
- [22:04]
Susan Glaser
Yes.
- [22:05]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, we will be revisiting this subject. Thank you so much, Susan.
- [22:10]
Susan Glaser
Well, thank you, Dorothy. It's amazing. Time.
- [22:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
Susan B. Glaser, a staff writer at the New Yorker who writes a weekly column on Trump's Washington, is the co author of Kremlin Vladimir Putin's Russia and the end of revolution. This has been the political scene. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com Feel free to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program was produced by Alex Barron and Kylie Warner. For new yorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [23:01]
Katie Drummond
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Colory, Wired's director of consumer, Tech and Culture.
- [23:08]
Dorothy Wickenden
And I'm Lauren Good.
- [23:09]
Susan Glaser
I'm a Senior Correspondent at Wired. And our show Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [23:17]
Katie Drummond
At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech, right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [23:48]
Susan Glaser
From PRX.