The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Trump on Trial: The Investigation, Impeachment, Acquittal and Aftermath by Kevin Sullivan, Mary Jordan

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

Trump on Trial: The Investigation, Impeachment, Acquittal and Aftermath by Kevin Sullivan, Mary Jordan A compelling and masterful account, based on fresh reporting, of the investigation, impeachment, and acquittal of President Donald Trump, a ferocious political drama that challenged American democracy itself. In the spring of 2019, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi did not favor pursuing Trump’s impeachment. Her view was: “He’s just not worth it.” But by September, after a whistleblower complaint suggesting that Trump had used his office for his political benefit, Pelosi decided to risk it. The impeachment inquiry led to charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, a gamble that ultimately meant Trump would be the first impeached president on the ballot in US history. Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post reporters Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan have crafted a powerful, intimate narrative that concentrates on the characters as well as the dramatic events, braiding them together to provide a remarkable understanding of what happened and why. Drawing on the deep reporting of Post journalists as well as new interviews, Sullivan and Jordan deliver a crisp page-turner with exquisite detail and scenes. They put readers in the room for both sides of the now-famous phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, 2019, revealing the in-the-moment reactions of those listening to the call in Washington, as well as the tension in Kyiv, as aides passed notes to Zelensky while he was talking to Trump. Sullivan and Jordan deftly illuminate the aims and calculations of key figures. Pelosi’s evolution from no to yes. Trump’s mounting fury as “the I-word” became inevitable. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell firmly telling Trump on the phone about the Senate trial: You need to trust me. Trump on Trial teems with unexpected moments. House member Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, alone at the National Archives, walking amid the nation’s founding documents, weighing her vote on impeachment. Fiery Republican congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida, a favorite Trump warrior, deciding to lead the storming of the secure room in the US Capitol basement, where witnesses were testifying. The authors paint vivid portraits of the men and women branded by the president’s supporters as foes from the “deep state”: Ukraine experts Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman; ambassadors Marie Yovanovitch and William Taylor. The narrative spools out amid Trump’s nonstop tweeting and the infinite echo chamber of social media, which amplified both parties’ messages in ways unknown during past impeachments. Sullivan and Jordan, aided by editor Steve Luxenberg, follow the story into the aftermath of Trump’s acquittal and the president’s payback for those whom he believed had betrayed him. The retributions took place as the nation reeled from a devastating pandemic and widespread protests about racial injustice, with another trial looming: the 2020 election.

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You can check out all the books. Make sure you order them up and all that good stuff. Today we have two of the most extraordinary authors on the show with their incredible new book. The book is called Trump on Trial, the Investigation, Impeachment, Acquittal, and Aftermath. These are both winners of the Pulitzer Prize from the Washington Post, Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan. I'll hold the book up here so we can see that. There you go. Kevin Sullivan is the Pulitzer Prize-winning senior correspondent and associate editor for the Washington Post. He was a post-foreign correspondent for 14 years.

Then he served as a chief foreign correspondent, deputy foreign editor, and Sunday and features editor. He's reported from more than 75 countries on six continents. Sullivan and his wife, Mary Jordan, were the Post's co-bureau chiefs in Tokyo, Mexico, City, and London. They won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for their coverage of Mexican criminal justice system. He has also won the George Polk Award from 1998, multiple overseas press awards, and been a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize multiple times. Mary Jordan writes about the national public issues for the Washington Post.

She spent 14 years abroad as a foreign correspondent and Washington Post's co-bureau chief in Tokyo, Mexico City, and London. She's written for more than 40 countries. She and her husband and Washington Post colleague Kevin Sullivan won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for their international reporting on the Mexican justice system. Welcome to the show, both of you. How are you guys doing? Thanks very much. We're doing great. In fact, when you're talking about us being married, I think that's one of the questions people, how can you write together? You know, this question I kind of had later for you in the book,

if we got into it, but I noticed that at the end, you had made an acknowledgment piece or a thing about how you had both written the book under COVID conditions, where you were kind of quarantined together. How was that? Well, it was wild. I mean, like everybody else, we were just at home and, you know, we have two kids. They're 25 and 23. So all four of us are at home and we're trying to, everybody's trying to make it work and everybody's got their own little corner of the house where they're doing their

thing. And Mary and I are here in the office just banging away on this book. And, you know, in some ways it was good because it gave us, it gave us something that was a intense focus for month after month after month. And, you know, I think it's harder when you don't have something to focus on. I mean, we spent so much time together. It's always COVID really. I mean, everything's time for personal COVID. I mean, like when we were in Tokyo writing together, you know, we were hungered down too. And I think you guys are 26 years in marriage? 27. 27.

Okay. But we don't look it. We really don't. You guys look like you're in your early 20s. So there you go. So this is an interesting book. It's a very thick tome, very highly detailed tome. What was the number one reason or top reasons that made you want to write this book?

I think, you know, these days, attention span is short. And this was a very big deal. You know, the House voted that President of the United States had abused his office, his power in the office and obstructed Congress. And we saw a lot of patterns. It's not just in the case of impeachment, which is a huge deal, but we see it over and over again, you know, chief among them, how Donald Trump spins conspiracy theories to damage people. And so we just thought that it was worthwhile, especially to get out before the election. You know, and during all through the impeachment processes, particularly the Republicans were saying, this is taking this decision out of voters hands. This is the Democrats have been wanting to get

rid of Donald Trump since the day he was elected in 2016. This is just another way for them to do it. And voters really are the ones who should be deciding this. And, you know, this book takes this incredible amount of information that was flowing over people and puts it together in a really readable way with characters and scenes and storylines and just makes it accessible. And it's something voters can use in 2020. That's one thing I really loved about the book is, you know, we all kind of went through this recently.

And of course this will be a book for historians to read 50, a hundred years from now. But you know, we got it in such different pieces and sporadically in this over here and, you know, flowing out through news reports, you guys really went into detail in the book to, to lay everything out in, in, lay everything out in the context of the sequence of events. How important was that to do, and why did you choose to do it that way? Well, incredibly important, because if we've succeeded, when you finish the book, you feel

like you've been to a movie, I think, because we tried to draw it in a way that just underscored the important themes, the important people, the important moments, the way you would with a movie, really. So just to help people, to make this accessible to people, the important moments, the way you would with a movie, really. So just to help people, to make this accessible to people, because this stuff is really important. And it's so relevant now to this incredibly important election we have coming up. Yeah, most definitely. It's something that you guys put together with 50,

I think other 50 other Washington Post reporters are credited helping compile this data. Well, we had great collaboration from the national security staff of the Washington Post and the congressional staff, White House staff. And then on top of that, then we did all our own original reporting, new reporting. For instance, everybody knows about Donald Trump being in the White House in the private residence with Vindman, you know, the famous Lieutenant Colonel who was in the Situation Room and got very alarmed by what he heard on the call. But we thought, hey, somebody else was on that call. And so we did the reporting to get what was going on thousands of miles away with in the room where the president of Ukraine was on the other end. And that's one of the scenes in there with the, you know, his aides passing him notes saying, make sure you mention the word swamp. Trump loves swamp. Make sure you stroke his ego and things like that. And it just fills

out the picture. Yeah. We talked to two of the people who were in the room with the president, with President Zelensky of Ukraine. And they were saying, you know, they gave him this whole long briefing. And one of them even said, maybe we should suggest building a Trump tower in Kiev. And all the other guys were like, no, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. That's crazy. Don't do that. But just say, tell him you want to drain the swamp. And, you know, and Zelensky, who was also a TV star before he became the president, really that was his only qualification was that he played the president of Ukraine on a TV show. Seriously.

I mean, the guy was a comedian until he decided to run for president. So he was very good when he was talking to the president. He really worked him very well. And he said, Mr. President, we've learned so much from you. We've learned so much from the way you do things. And we're draining the swamp. And, you know, just all of these details that we were able to get and fill out that picture of a phone call that we all thought we knew pretty well.

Yeah, you guys do fill it out. And like I said, the layout of the timeline, the events, everyone involved, you can see what's happening with Pelosi. You can see what's happening in Ukraine. You can see the orchestration of Rudy Giuliani and William Barr and everything that's going on. This is crazy. Now, you mentioned C-SPAN was also helpful in this book. In what way was that? Well, we would watch over and over so that you could see exactly who's in the room. I mean, we really wanted to document both historic document using video. And that was why we watched, for instance, the National Prayer Breakfast. We found out that it was on video. So we could see Nancy Pelosi's face when Trump stood up and started saying all kinds of things that she certainly thought weren't true.

And we had, we already had accounts of some of these things, and even some of the things that were like lesser, not as well known, but important to the story. Like there was a press conference where a reporter said to Nancy Pelosi, you know, Madam Speaker, do you hate the president? And it just hit her exactly the wrong way. And she stopped and she came back and she said to him, I don't hate anybody. I was raised in a Catholic home. I don't hate people. So we knew that had happened. But C-SPAN has this incredibly deep library of video.

And we watched it over and over and over again. And you can paint a much more nuanced picture of what happened because of having that video. I remember watching that video several times over. Pretty remarkable, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. I mean, and to see her come back in, and she kind of pulled that mom card, you know, with the finger and everything, you know,

when you upset your mom and she uses all of your name, you know, you're in trouble. So what were some of the stories that impacted you guys, or you feel readers will most find eye-opening when they read the book? Well, one of them was, so Representative Will Hurd from Texas is a, is a centrist, and he, you know, he had already been on record as not being kind of a knee-jerk supporter of the president. He'd written an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing Trump for his position on Russia and his relationship with Putin. So he was someone who the Democrats kept thinking, we could flip this guy. This is someone who will, if we make a reasonable case, we can reason with this guy. And this is a Republican we can win over

so it doesn't have to be a totally partisan impeachment. And so we talked to Hurd, and we got his side of the whole thing and his thinking through the whole process. And it turns out he was actually getting frustrated by this because he pretty much had made up his mind that he was going to support Trump. He thought what he had seen was bungled foreign policy and inept, and he had a whole bunch of other very colorful words for how much, how much he just disliked what Trump had done in Ukraine. But he said it didn't rise to the level of an impeachable offense. So we walked through that whole situation with him to the point where he gets to a hearing and instead of using his five minutes to question, he uses his five

minutes to give this really impassioned speech about why he's going to be supporting, supporting Trump, even though he thinks his foreign policy is terrible. So it's just one of those moments that you don't – nobody takes the time to stop and actually go deep on a moment like that. But we were able to in this book, and I think that's one of the value-added things about the book. Yeah, you guys really got the – really just the raw detail of it. And that's what I really loved about the book is, is you see the everything, you know, cause I,

I watched a lot of TV during the thing, but you see how everything just comes out and you see all the players and you see all the parts and stuff. You, I mean, like you say, you can almost do a movie from it. Was there anything in the book that surprised you?

Because you guys are reporters. You guys see a lot of this stuff. You cover a lot of this stuff through the Washington Post. Was there anything that you were like, what? That happened? I think we know the power of social media, but we lay out in a TikTok how if a tiny thing is, and it's often seeded by Donald Trump or one of his friends, Giuliani, even conspiracy theories. We saw how it'll be on a really obscure site and how quickly it's amped up.

Right. So it's it starts in one place that nobody really sees somebody. Donald Jr. retweets it all of a sudden, several million. And then when the president weighs in, he has 85 million followers. And so, you know, as he says, he's bigger than most media companies. And we know from our own reporting that sometimes he likes to count how quickly, like literally count the minutes until something that is seated in a small place becomes national news i guess i didn't quite realize how orchestrated and fast lightning fast it is it's quite the system they have going on there on the right wing media like you detail in the book how love harness uh they

they take in they take in their they planned the dump uh that they're going to do on the Ukrainian ambassador. And like you say, it just hits and spreads. They've got Hannity set up. Like everybody's ready up to go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's just like a machine as to how the thing operates. It's extraordinary to see. And I think that even though we know it, it's important to x-ray it, right? This is a pattern.

This is not a one-off. He's done this many times. And so especially as we, you know, want to know more about how the president operates, it's kind of a playbook of how he operates with documents from impeachment. And don't forget, this isn't simply about who tweeted what to whom. I mean, this is like that case that you're talking about. So early in the morning, Hill TV puts up this very dubious report claiming that the Ambassador Yovanovitch, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, is corrupt. There's zero evidence for that. That's ludicrous. But within 24 hours after it's been on Hannity's radio show and Hannity's television show and Donald Trump Jr. has tweeted about it and the president has tweeted about it. The next morning, the president told John Bolton, his national security adviser, to fire the ambassador. So this went from a spark started by nothing into a full pledged order by the president of the United States to do something that a lot of you could pretty easily argue

didn't make a whole lot of sense. Yeah. It's just extraordinary how they have it all down, and it just all comes out. Was there any heartbreaking pivotal moments that you found in the book that moved you guys or the readers? Anything that really touched you and you went, wow. Yeah, that's a great question. I think that what's happened to the Foreign Service,

what's happened to career State Department officials, you know, people that had served for decades, both Republicans and Democrats, who really devoted their lives at not great pay and often in dangerous places, you know, to the country, that their opinion was, you know, pushed aside. And they were called the deep state. And there was a disdain for their expertise. And many of them left. And, you know, right down from ambassadors to, you know, some experts in Ukraine and other parts of the world. And, you know, all of those are lives, you know, and it's also kind of a hollowing out that we've heard also about who wants to go into the Foreign Service, the Career Service, that has been kind of a place for the best and the brightest at times. I mean, it was heartbreaking to hear people say,

I am devastated, and I am discouraged, and I'm going to leave. And if you look at what happened to Ambassador Yovanovitch we just mentioned, she had been 33 years in the Foreign Service. She had been shot at, blown up. She'd served in some tough places. She served in Mogadishu and Somalia. This was a woman who had really given blood literally for the country. After all of this stuff, these wild things that Rudy Giuliani and others were kind of

seeding about her, she got a call at one o'clock in the morning, Kiev time, telling her that the president had lost confidence in her and she needed to get on the next plane home. Now, of course, it's the president's prerogative to remove any ambassador. They serve at the pleasure of the president, and he doesn't even need a reason. I mean, he didn't do anything illegal or wrong, but he called her home in the middle of the night, and she was there. She wasn't married. She was there with her 90-year-old mother, and she had to leave her mother there because there was no way she could make arrangements to get her mother on a plane on that short notice and she didn't know she was coming back or never coming back and it was heartbreaking she left her mother and her 90 year old mother saying am i

gonna be okay what's and you know and when donald trump jr tweeted um basically calling her a joker she said it was like being punched in the gut. You know, he doesn't, you know, and there was just this, you know, people who Republicans in the Foreign Service were really going like, oh, my God, what is happening? And it's just the point is that these are real people. And, you know, from the Trump side, the complaint is that these people think they run foreign policy, not the president.

But there was no evidence that that's what they were doing. These were people who had served presidents from both parties and presidents who, I'm sure, in their own personal political beliefs, one way or the other, had to do things at times that they didn't agree with. But they did them because their allegiance, the oath they took, was to the Constitution. So it's just, you know, you forget that these are real people. And, you know, when you see what happened to Yovanovitch and other people who were fired and moved aside and had their careers. You know, Alexander Vindman, the lieutenant colonel, Ukraine specialist on the National Security Council. His twin brother also was an army officer who was also serving on the NSC. And President Trump fired him, too, just for good measure.

He hadn't. I mean, he was just apparently Vindman thinks just because he was related to Vindman. And Vindman was vilified as un-American. And it's interesting that we have all the backstory to Ken Burns, who writes, you know, does movies about so many very American things from baseball to the Civil War, actually had picked the Vindman twins when they were young to talk about the American dream. You know, these guys were so proud of their new country that they both went into the military. Yeah, you talk in the book, too, about how the ambassador, her parents came from, I believe, from Russia or the Russian. You know, they came from the persecution of all of that stuff. They survived it and they came to America.

And to me, yeah, the heartbreaking moments of it were watching these people, especially when they're testifying. To me, and I for a lot of people made him cry. Based upon what you guys wrote in the book and everything that's happened since, does right still matter in America? I think it absolutely does. I mean, I think, and I think that's why you have, that's why you have books like this. I think you have books like this to kind of, to set the, you know, to hold people accountable, to show exactly what happened, to be dispassionate and truthful. I mean, because right does matter. And you shouldn't just say, well, that was awful. So

we'll just let it slide and hope it doesn't happen again. That's not what we do. We, in this country, we have always examined our wounds, our problems, our mistakes, and we've learned from them. And I hope that's what we can do in some ways with this part. Right. Winston Churchill said Americans always do the right thing after they exhaust every other opportunity. And but right now, I think, you know, I do think that Americans do the right thing. But there's so much disinformation, wrong information and purposefully so. And again, that's why we set this out. And you'll see that we, you know, the extensive, we have 50 pages of footnotes,, have complete faith that when given the right information, correct information, yes, they will. That's right. People are good. Americans are good. But a lot of them aren't getting information.

They don't know what information to trust. And the truth of certain matters depends on what television channel you tune into often. And people just don't know what to do yeah and it it's really interesting to me the bias that people play to the unconscious bias uh sometimes they don't they don't tune in or they tune out um do you what do you want uh historians to look at this book uh 30 40 years from now how do you want historians to look at this book 30, 40 years from now? How do you want them to perceive it and look back on it, I guess? It'll be small moments, too, that when John Lewis,

the civil rights icon who recently died, again, we went back to look at some of the speeches on the floor. And at the time, it got very little press. But he stood up, very sick, and said, people are coming up to me and saying that right now in America, we feel that we're descending into darkness. And when I go to sleep at night, sometimes I worry that when I wake up, our democracy will be gone. And, you know, I think we didn't stop and look at that speech, because sometimes when people are speaking on the floor of the house, there's like eight people there. But I think there will be nuggets like that, along with this record of our times. We have the Republicans

storming the compartment three stories underneath the Capitol. It's supposed to be a secure place where you look at sensitive intelligence documents. Nobody had ever done that before. That was a complete shock to people who had, you know, we used to have norms and a lot of norms have been busted. I think we want people to look back also and think this is fair. This illuminated a moment, a very important moment in American history. It illuminated something about a guy who's certainly going to go down as a historical figure one way or the other.

You know, this president has shaken this country up so much a guy who's certainly going to go down as a historical figure one way or the other. You know, this president has shaken this country up so much that this will be one snapshot of how he does things and how he approaches problems and how he views the world. And it'll be in a way that is accessible, that people will have, you know, it's not some, you know, you're not like reading the W book from the Encyclopedia Britannica. You know, this is something you can read. This is something you can actually have fun with, and you get to know the people and meet them. But it illuminates a really key moment in history, and we hope that's what people see now and what they see in the future.

John Bolton, now we've been able now to read his book. At the time, we didn't know what was in his head. How big of a difference in writing this book, studying what John Bolton has now said in his book, how much of a difference do you think that would have made in what you guys explored and investigated, or would it have made a difference if he had testified in the House? You know, this is the great imponderable, right? Because what he, you know, I don't get the sense now after his book that he's changed a lot of minds. I think people in the world we live in, people view this through their own lens. And I think if he had appeared, if he had testified in the Senate, I think the Democrats would have been saying, see, see, see.

And the Republicans would have been saying, I don't see anything. You know, I mean, this is just, so, I mean, it was, it was important, and you can see how important it was, particularly to Mitch McConnell. I mean, he fought very hard to make sure that didn't happen, and how hard, how important it was to the Democrats who fought very hard to try to get Bolton in. For sure, the moment when it was clear he wasn't going to testify, that was it. The trial was over. Because when they weren't calling witnesses, you know, we talked to many people, that was a key, key moment.

It was the beginning of the end. Yeah, and he was surprised that he was going to get blocked in the Senate. Like, I think he actually, did he, actually did. I'm just going from the reports, but I think he thought he would be testifying in the Senate, and then all of a sudden, like, nope. He and his lawyer had a strategy. They didn't want to testify in the House because the House testimony is a two-pronged thing. You give a deposition in private, and then you go and you appear in public at a public hearing. And on a matter this complicated, there's so much room for a gotcha.

There's so much room for, well, that doesn't line up exactly with what you said in your deposition. And Bolton knew that the political posturing in the House was just off the charts, and that if he misspoke one syllable, he was going to get crucified. He was much happier. His strategy was to testify in the Senate, where he thought that he would get a much more, you know, fair, measured forum, especially with John Roberts, the very well-respected Chief Justice presiding. He felt that Roberts wouldn't let the thing get out of hand. So he was more than, I mean, eager is probably the wrong word, but he certainly was willing to testify in the Senate.

You know, we talked about how different media is affecting people and everything else. I had Jill Weinbanks on the show to talk about her great book, Watergate Girl. And I asked her, I said, if Nixon had had social media, Fox News, and all these different things, would he have been able to skip resignation? What does I am not a crook look like in all caps? In all caps. Yeah.

I mean, and she was like, I think he might have survived. You know, I mean, technically he resigned before he got impeached, but definitely the votes from the House. You know, it was interesting. There were different respectable people, I think, more back then. I mean, the Washington Post clearly covered Nixon and all that sort of stuff. You guys have a storied history with that data. Um, do you, do you think that, uh, I mean, watching Jim Jordan and, and, and some of the different Mac gates and some of the different antics that were almost like, uh, I don't know, like toddlers just running crazy through the, the, uh, the attorney who with the funky

ears that I, you know, that's my opinion. Uh, you know, they'd almost kind of look like, I don't know, he gave off a seedy thing. That's my opinion. Um, but just watching some of it, you know, he gave off a seedy thing. That's my opinion. But just watching some of it, you know, it was just extraordinary to watch. You're like, so many people like your point there where they're playing for this audience. There were times when we saw that members of Congress were more intent on getting a selfie or a picture to post instantly more than even listening. And, you know, a lot of people were posturing for themselves, less of a, you know, country first thing.

And many, many people, many, many examples in there of that. And so social media has completely changed how Capitol Hill operates. And I think Capitol Hill has changed, too. I mean, so you have Lamar Alexander, the senator from Tennessee, very distinguished gentleman, was the president of the University of Tennessee, very well respected Republican senator who was retiring, not running for reelection. So he was another one who was on the Democrats' list of, you know, can we flip him? And they were all saying, will he have a Howard Baker moment? Because Howard Baker was a very distinguished Republican senator

from Tennessee during Watergate, and he's the one who coined the phrase, what did the president know and when did he know it? So, and that wasn't what the Republicans really wanted to hear back then. So, you know, he was brave, he stood up, and he stood up for what was right. And people were saying, when is Lamar Alexander going to have his Howard Baker moment? Now, Alexander ultimately said, you know, like some of the others, he said, you know, I see disgraceful behavior here,

but I don't see anything that rises to the level of an impeachment. And he said, that was my Howard Baker. You know, we did interviews with him, and he said, that was my Howard Baker moment, because that's when I stood up and said exactly what I believed in my heart to be right. It was kind of interesting to watch the play of Democrats going, you know, trying to figure out which one was betting. There was different news channels and articles. MSNBC is famous for this. I love MSNBC, but they're famous for

what was in SNL called impeachment porn. I watch a lot of MSNBC. I love it. Rachel Maddow does such great stuff. Watching all of it, they're like, in the mitt romney kind of emerged as a as you know you're like oh i think mitt romney's gonna flip susan collins and different things and it was like this whole play out of like is susan collins gonna flip and you know and the cavanaugh hearings are the same

way and so i think you guys described some of that detail in the book. And, you know, the race right now going up in Maine against Susan Collins, many people think she will lose that seat because they didn't really like how she was operating. And they thought that it was a sign that it was no longer really a Republican Party. It was a Trump party. And, you know, that's the big difference too, I think from Nixon's times is that Trump is unlike any other president. And if you cross him, you know,

people know the consequences. And also people know that if they get in selfies with him and they say they're with Trump, that they might get elected. But in Collins' case, in a divided state like Maine, it's not going down well. And impeachment is actually on the ballot, essentially, in that race. And again, that's why these issues that we raise in the book are live. They are active right now.

Susan Collins is in trouble in Maine in large part because of, you know, there's a meme now. Susan Collins is concerned. Because she's often concerned, and she often says that she may not, you know, she may split from Trump and, you know, virtually never does. So that's what Sarah Gideon, her opponent is saying. It's like, you know, Susan Collins says she's a moderate, but she's not. She's a Trumper. So, and she points to the impeachment vote as evidence of that. So these are live issues. These are things that are happening right now. And if the Senate does flip and the majority is changed to Democrats in November,

no matter what happens with the White House, people say it will be a lot. Impeachment will play into it. There was that moment of the interview with Susan Collins where she makes the statement that I think he's learned his lesson. And that has really come back. Who didn't believe that? Yeah. You know, she furrowed her brow a little.

I think he's learned his lesson. And you're just like, you have no idea what we're dealing with here. I mean, most people think that impeachment has emboldened him. And certainly the night that the House voted to impeachment, he was very upset. And we have a lot about this in the book. And actually, we sent somebody to Battle Creek, Michigan. He held a rally that night. And when the vote came in, he basically he led the whole crowd, big rally, and said, we are going to get four more years.

That night, he said, you know, basically at all costs, I'm going to win. I'm going to win another term. I'm going to be the first, first ever president to be impeached and then be sent back to office because he was upset about the stain, you know, the stain on his image. And so it's a big motivator for Trump in November to win. I think that that chapter Mary just mentioned, I think is my favorite chapter in the book, because we do this wild thing where we have, we do it, we were thinking of it as like split screening your TV, where you have the impeachment happening in Washington and Trump on stage at the

rally in Battle Creek. And we do minute by minute, what people are saying. And, you know, and as Trump finished saying this, you know, Adam Schiff was saying that. And, you know, Trump was talking about how it doesn't even feel like we're being impeached, does it? And everybody's laughing. And at that moment, Nancy Pelosi is gaveling Article 1. It passes. So it was, you know, in addition to the very important issues, it was fun to write because it felt like you're showing in a really vivid way how these two events collided. And all the energy that kind of crackles between the two events was fun to work on.

In researching your book this morning, I watched that Pelosi video where she gavels the vote for impeachment and she's she it seems that she stops for a second when she realizes one person has said present voted present and she's like what what the hell but yeah it was interesting to watch um telsey gabbard is a little hard to predict so that was yeah i'm just so glad that and at that moment when he was impeached, you know, in Michigan, Trump spin instant. Every single Republican voted with me. And the crowd roars already, you know, immediately just saying this was a partisan thing. This has nothing to do about what was at the heart of one of the key charges. He was trying with a fake story to damage Joe Biden.

And he was using the office of the presidency and military aid for a foreign country that had been approved by Congress. He was like basically holding up hundreds of millions of dollars to a country until they announced that they were looking into corruption of Joe Biden. And like, you know, and that was all forgotten because he kept saying, you know, this is partisan, they're coming at me. And again, that's why it's important to look back at what was really at the root of this. He identified Biden early as a potent contender, as a big problem for him, and he wanted to undercut him with a conspiracy theory. And by the way, the first person who mentioned that conspiracy theory, one of the ones that Trump was running with about was Putin himself. You know, when it was said that Russia, when our U.S. intelligence officials were saying that Russia interfered with the 2016 election, Putin said, no, no, it was Ukraine. And all of a sudden, you know, Trump's folks are like, Ukraine was doing it. Ukraine was doing it.

By the way, can you look at corruption about Joe Biden in Ukraine? Yeah, and China too. Yeah, that's crazy. You know, I love the Churchill quote. I love Churchill. And I hope that we don't change until it's too late. We kind of almost did in World War II. But this referendum is a really seminal moment for America, as I'm sure you know. You know, Nixon was in a second term.

Clinton was in a second term. This would be, I think, the first time a president in modern times would be up for election after an impeachment. And we're going to see if the electorate is going to revote someone who is technically accused of indicted under criminal charges, under criminal political charges. But we're actually going to, this is a huge V moment, Y moment of the road. And they're going to look back on your, we're going to look back in your guys' book in probably two ways. One of, I'm going to be hiding this from the people who come to the house to search it for the secret police,

or I'm going to be proud to share this with my children. Either way, I'll probably share it with my children. But what do you think about that? I think, you know, people ask what's the lasting legacy of this whole episode. And, you know, impeachment is written to the Constitution as the most powerful mechanism that Congress has to hold a president accountable. And what we're seeing now is that impeachment really has become, given the realities, has become more of a howl of protest, how it's a censure against the president, really rather more, much more than a way to actually remove him from office.

And that's really dangerous stuff because it's been more than 80 years since the Senate has had a two-thirds majority by either party, which is what's required to remove a president. That's not going to change anytime soon. So if impeachment really has become, if that fundamental mechanism has been watered down, weakened, that's tough times for our country. I think people are worried that this important check on the power of the presidency is gone because Trump knows that if he wins again, he doesn't care if he gets impeached again. He beat it before, didn't do anything. And, you know, we hear this over and over again about that. He's ignoring subpoenas.

The power of the presidency is getting too big. There is Congress is a rubber stamp. It's not a check on power. The tool of impeachment is no longer really. It's become it's seen anyway as just a partisan snap, slap on the wrist. So what is it to, you know, keep our democracy, as John Lewis was saying, safe? And, you know, maybe a little bit ironically, the person who made this argument the most eloquently was Mitt Romney himself, when he stood up in the Senate and voted to convict Trump on Article One on the Abusive Power article.

He's the one who said, you know, I know people are saying we should wait for the voters, but read the Constitution. The Constitution doesn't say if the president does something wrong, wait for the voters. The Constitution says, Congress, if the president does something wrong, you have the responsibility, you have this awesome power. You have this mechanism. Do something about it. And so Romney was saying, we don't wait. We go. And if that power has been removed or has been watered down, you know, that's something to worry about.

It definitely is. And to me, I think it weakens the Constitution's value because it just, like you say, it makes the impeachment clause like, well, that's nice. You got that in there. Right. You deserve that. So this is a really great book. And you guys also get into the details of what we've seen, the persecution of Alexander Vindman, Colonel Alexander Vindman, the ambassadors Marie Yovanovitch. I believe she has a book coming out soon, William Taylor, Fiona Hill. ends, whether it's a good story and these people get redemption of some type or, I don't

know, further vilified or just, I don't know. I mean, God knows what sort of thing. We've seen the payback. This president, I mean, immediately after the acquittal, he had this amazing, he used the East Room of the White House and started calling names to everybody who had voted against him, trashed the FBI, called people nasty and things, and said, this is a celebration of my acquittal. And then he went back to trashing everybody else. And then we saw how people lost their jobs. I mean, he's made a point of it.

He has said, if you hit me, I'll hit you back 10 times harder. And that's one of the reasons people stay in line, you know, the party stays in line. And so I think if there's another four years, we'll see more of that. And the whole philosophy of government in this country is that the president sets the policy. And then we have this, we have this whole career, you know, government, full of people with expertise and experience who've learned things and understand these issues, you know, health, vaccines, taxation, who knows what. And it's, that's always been the way we've done business, we've had kind of the best and the brightest working in government in support of our political leaders. And if we're going to abandon that, that's something we need to have a

discussion about too, because in the place of that, Trump seems to be much more happy with having people in there who just say, yes, sir. And now that's his right, but he's changing a fundamental philosophy of how we govern ourselves. And we see that with the coronavirus, too. Does he want to listen to the doctors? You know, it's this kind of skepticism. Oh, they're like experts are bad. You know, I know better. And so another thing that we hope is that you see the patterns here. You see disregard for experts. You see the fanning of conspiracy theories over and over, not just this. We've heard lots of them. And it's confusing to some people because they're picked up by some pro-Trump figures. Sean Hannity is one of them, but there are others.

Now, recently, the Washington Post, and I love the Washington Post, I subscribe to it, and I encourage everyone to as well support your news channels. You guys came up with the White House is doing dossiers on you guys. And we requested from the White House your dossiers. So I don't know if you want to... Are you going to read them out?

I've got this really thick one right here. Everybody will be asleep in the next five minutes. Oh, this is the binders of women from Mitt Romney I'm sorry here's the dossier right here on you guys I figured you might want to see it

let's see if I can hold it up Washington Post Very Bad Covfefe so and it's written in sharpie it's written in sharpie so we know I think we know who's keeping those dossiers. But no, this did come out where you guys, the White House has said they're creating dossiers on you guys.

How does that feel for the President of the United States? You know, all joking aside. You know, we were foreign correspondents for a long time, and people abroad, like in Mexico, where we worked there, they would look to the press in the United States for guidance. You know, we were an independent Czech, kind of a watchdog. Hey, you know, let's see, you know, Watergate was an example, right? You know, we can tell vital information to reporters and in dictatorships, they censor media. So we were kind of a light for the world. And I can't tell you all these people that we've met are saying, oh, my God, because Trump keeps saying pounding the media with fake media, fake, fake, fake media. That is picked up by leaders around the world, you know, authoritarian leaders in Hungary and in other countries.

They literally quote him word for word. And now we're hearing from our friends that basically it's what he's doing is poisoned and weakened the press around the world, which is vital to know what's going on. I covered the school board, for instance. And if you weren't there to kind of tell people where they were putting money, you know, people didn't know. It does matter. And it's sad. And I think every reporter has a supreme responsibility to get it right,

not to be fair, to be, you know, down the line. And there's all kinds of, in these partisan days, I think the rise of cable network where it be, you know, down the line. And there's all kinds of, in these partisan days, I think the rise of cable network, where it had, you know, one side was, you know, pro this party, and one was it has been a really negative thing. We miss kind of the down the line reporting. But lately, I think it's been a tragedy. And it's exported the tragedy around the world, because it's who we are as a country. America has always been an inspiration. And we have seen this firsthand, as Mary said, all around the world.

And we have a responsibility to be that inspiration. If you're a human rights activist in Hungary, if you're a journalist in the Philippines, you look at what's going on in the United States and you are heartbroken. And your life is actually in more danger than it was. Because when the United States starts acting like some of these dictatorships we see around the world, these places with authoritarian leaders, it's very dangerous. And it's abdicating this kind of role that we have to be something to aspire to, to be the United States, to be, you know, we want to be America. We want to be more like America. And one of the most difficult things is why Donald Trump keeps praising or aligning with Putin. For instance, in Putin, you know, reporters have died in Russia for reporting

negative things against the leader in Russia. And, you know, it's really mind blowing to a lot of people, why he is so in sync with the Russian leader. And, you know, journalists are like, wow, you know, we're getting killed. I mean, there's yet another opponent of Putin was just poisoned. And it's hard for people to write over there and link all these, because their lives will be in danger. I mean, the press has its faults. The press has a responsibility, but the press is an important check on power. You answered the question I have for you next. How important is journalism in today's world?

You know, there's been seeing, I forget the name of the CNN reporter. He had to take two to three bodyguards to start attending the Trump events because, because, you know, and we live in that world. I mean, you guys have been all over the world. You've 70, 40 to 75 countries. You guys have seen that where you probably maybe have to have a security at the shade or something. Somebody said, somebody said to Trump at one point, why do you do this? Some reporters said, why do you call us enemy of the people? Why do you, why do you do that? Why do you say we're fake news? And he says, I do it so nobody will believe

you. And that's what he's done. He's undermined confidence in the press, but he's also taken it a step further. This enemy of the people thing is really dangerous. Calling the press the enemy of the people is not a safe thing. If you write about he doesn't reveal his taxes or his extramarital affairs, the answer is I hate the media. It's just a way to deflect. What's extraordinary to me is that the American people eat that up, that we flipped in this death of expertise sort of age where they go whatever. One of the things that I hold on to, one of those things on a daily basis,

I wake up and go, what's going on? Oh, geez. And going to the Washington Post website, and I remember when you guys came up with this title, Democracy Dies in Darkness. And that's a real assuring little log to hold on to sometimes when I see it. I'm telling you, you just go go okay man we're we got hope we got some hope man just hold on to that little hope it's like every day you're kind of grasping for little hope pieces um the um and

then after that was right after trump's election speech is dystopian american carnage and his failed attacks on muslims and immigrants you know we're seeing that just attack go on from Stephen Miller right out of the gate. What does democracy dies in darkness mean to you? I think that we need to keep the focus on, you know, all the people around Trump that have already gone to jail or have been indicted, that we need to tell people, you know, what they're not revealing. We need to stay on the important issues. What is he doing?

What is he not doing? What are the expertise? And I think we just need to keep our head focused on doing the work that we do, which is to shine a spotlight on important issues and let people decide. And we're still doing what we've always done. You know, somebody famously asked our boss, Marty Baron, once,

are you at war with the president? And Marty looked at them and said, we are not at war. We are at work. This is what we do. We're not doing anything different from them than we did when, you know, when Clinton was the president, when Nixon was the president, you know, ask, ask Bill Clinton if he liked The Washington Post when he was the president. You know, it isn't you're not going to you're not going to get an answer that that that we were soft on him.

But Clinton didn't have 85 million Twitter followers and, you know, spin out conspiracy theories, fake stories, lies, deflection to just so confuse people that whenever he's hit with something, he comes out with something else. And the nicknames, you know, from we go to, you know, those are just kind of what we have a president literally called the head of the Intelligence Committee, a pencil neck ship, and, you know, all these things that are just so one of a kind, you know, we can't imagine other presidents doing this that it we don't even know what to focus on you know and that's a strategy which gets gets back to the point we were talking about before people are good people are fundamentally good and they want to do the right thing it's just that they're being so bombarded with with bad information and

misinformation and propaganda that we feel like one of the things that we can do is just try our best to be as straight as we can and to report on this unprecedented presidency. And if sometimes it feels frantic, it's because it is frantic. The pace of the reporting is frantic. He's setting a tone that's 26 hours a day. But, you know, we try our very best to stick to our mission, which is to tell you what the truth is as close as we can ascertain it. I think it's been interesting, too, to watch the Washington Post and this historic news entity and have him use the Jeff Bezos ownership.

And you sit and you look at some of it and you go, are you just really jealous because he's got more money than you? But he uses it against you guys as a whipping post. Well, I think it just conjures up in people's mind, oh, maybe there's something there. People don't like it when anybody gets too big any company and so okay so bezos we know for a fact uh does not get involved in editorial the only thing he has done is you know we were kind of in trouble as a newspaper the

whole industry was in trouble and laying off people and he puts he put money in an investment and he also gave us better software that you know when you used to hit a story it took like 30 seconds to load well when you get more money you get better software it's up there in a minute that's what he's done he's not messing with editorial but trump brings it up because oh the seeds kind of some dark thing that bezos is out together it's it's. It's an easy bogeyman. You know, it's easy to set him up as the evil Jeff Bezos running the evil empire of the Washington Post. And it's just, it's not true.

It's garbage. I think one of the most important things about this book, too, is it comes out at a time that you don't hear anything about the impeachment. For anything you know about the news and what's going on, Like even the Democrats really didn't bring it up in the convention. Like no one's bringing it up. Like it's almost like it didn't stick. Because Trump just used the White House as a backdrop. Nobody is ever supposed to do that because Bannon, who engineered his race, was just arrested, you know, on a yacht. You know, there's just so much. We are so flooded. And we're standing on a train track with two locomotives coming at us from different directions,

you know, COVID and the race unrest that we've seen in the country. And it's just taking over. I mean, it's the Democrats look at those issues, you know, Trump's performance on COVID and Trump's, the way Trump has handled the racial unrest in this country. And they see those as better opportunity for them, better, you know, louder, easier to understand arguments than the impeachment, I think. But we just hope that people see this as a, it's really the operating manual of Donald Trump. And we use Republican and Democratic testimony. We use video. We use 50 pages of footnotes to tell you where it is. But what you see in there, you see repeatedly.

These are patterns of Donald Trump laid out with the help of all the documents from impeachment. It's quite extraordinary. What will be interesting to see is when historians look back, referencing your book, is if the Senate had impeached him, if it would have saved many of the lives of what is now 180,000 people, I believe we've crossed, and probably close to 300,000 maybe by the time we're done, the difference it would have made, I mean, in the real scale of lives, most times you can't measure this stuff. Like Clinton's impeachment, you know, nobody's going to really die over this.

But you look at the layout of that. And then, of course, if he gets reelected, you guys may be writing another impeachment book if maybe the Democrats take the Senate too, keep the House. And then we have to go to some sort of constitutional thing was like, can you impeach a president twice? That's not, is that in the Constitution or whatever, but I don't think it says, I think you can, there's no double jeopardy. We can just keep right on, right on going. But you guys lay out in the book, it's really

interesting how, how Pelosi goes in into strategy this, and it really details why she was really waiting for something that was significant because she was getting pestered so much. Anything more we want to know about your guys' book before we part ways here? Buy it. Buy the book. Where's the good plugs people can find you on the interwebs

and order the book up? Yeah, only what we we have been been saying is that this book is is about this very moment it's it's about what's happening right now it's about how donald trump is doing business right now and how he will be doing it between now and the election and if you want to understand that better there's the book buy the book order it up today you can get on amazon it's the book trump order it up today. You can get it on Amazon. It's the book, Trump on Trial, The Investigation, Impeachment, Acquittal, and Aftermath by Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan, winners of the Pulitzer Prize from the Washington Post.

It's been wonderful to have you guys here. I probably could ask you 50,000 questions about everything, but I know you guys got to get back to whatever you just tweeted over this hour. Chris, thank you so much. Thank you, Chris. We really appreciate it. Thank you for being on the show, guys. To my audience, I'm sorry to cut you off. Was that our last piece you had there?

No, I was saying great interview. Thanks, Chris. Thank you very much. We really try hard and all that good stuff. Thanks for tuning in to my audience, and we'll see you guys next time.