The Daily Signal - Impeachment Evidence 'Not Even Close' to Bribery, Says Heritage Expert

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

As impeachment hearings draw to a close, witnesses have failed to produce hard evidence of wrongdoing on the part of President Donald Trump. Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky will join the podcast to unpack what we learned this week—and what to expect going forward. We also cover the following stories: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. Senate approves a stopgap bill to prevent government shutdown. House Democrats demand Trump fire top advisor Stephen Miller. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, November 22nd. I'm Kate Trinko. And I'm Daniel Davis. As impeachment hearings draw to a close, Republicans have managed to show that the witnesses don't have direct proof of President Trump's wrongdoing. Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spikovsky will join the podcast to unpack what we've learned this week and what to expect next. And if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on iTunes. and please encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news.

Thursday's impeachment hearings featured Fiona Hill, formerly an aide to John Bolton and an expert on Russia at the National Security Council, and David Holmes, a diplomat who works in the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. Here's part of what Holmes said in his opening statement via ABC News. My name is David Holmes, and I'm a career Foreign Service Officer with the Department of State. Since August 2017, I've been the political. counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine. Beginning in March 2019, the situation at the embassy and in Ukraine changed dramatically. Specifically, the three priorities of security,

economy, and justice, and our support for Ukrainian democratic resistance to Russian aggression became overshadowed by a political agenda promoted by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and a cadre of officials operating with a direct channel to the White House. Holmes also said this via CNN. It's exactly my point. I briefed the call in detail of the deputy chief of mission, went away for a week, come back, I refer to the call, and everyone is nodding. Of course that's what's going on. Of course the president is pressing for a Biden investigation before he'll do these things the Ukrainians want.

There was nodding agreement. So did I go through every single word in the call? No, because everyone by that point agreed. It was obvious what the president was pressing for. And Ambassador Taylor, as you've just outlined, had all those other interactions. But he didn't share it with us. Hill, via CNN, said that John Bolton, the former national security advisor,

was concerned about Rudy Giuliani. You also, I believe, testified that Ambassador Bolton had expressed some views to you about Mr. Giuliani's interest in Ukraine. Do you recall what you said? Yes. What he said to you, rather? I do recall, yes. It was part of a conversation about the things that Mr.

Giuliani was saying very frequently in public, and we saw them often, or saw him often, on television making these statements. And I had already brought to Ambassador Bolton's attention, the attacks, the smear campaign against Ambassador Yovanovitch and expressed regret about how this was unfolding and, in fact, the shameful way in which

Ambassador Yovanovich was being smeared and attacked. And I'd asked if there was anything that we could do about it, And Ambassador Bolton had looked pained, basically indicated with body language that there was nothing which we could do about it. And he then, in the course of that discussion, said that Rudy Giuliani was a hand grenade that was going to blow everyone up. Did you understand what he meant by that? I did, actually. What did he mean? Well, I think he meant that, obviously, what Mr. Giuliani was saying was pretty explosive in any case.

He was frequently on television, making quite incendiary remarks about everyone. involved in this, and that he was clearly pushing forward issues and ideas that would probably come back to haunters. And in fact, I think that that's where we are today. President Trump tweeted Thursday morning, Ken Starr, former independent counsel. Does this reach the level of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors? My assessment of the evidence so far, nowhere close. The evidence is conflicting and ambiguous. Ambassador Sondland's testimony stated that President Trump said the Ukraine president should just do the right thing, no quid pro quo.

You shouldn't charge, but you cannot convict, a sitting president on the basis of conflicting and ambiguous evidence and destabilize the American government. Thank you, Ken. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of public trust. Israel's Attorney General, Avichai Mandelblit, made the announcement Thursday in what he called a heavy-hearted decision. Netanyahu faces up to 13 years of prison if convicted on all counts. In a televised response, he maintained his innocence and called it a witch hunt. He said,

per NBC News, I give my life to this state, I fought for it, I was wounded for it. I have to say this is a very hard day. I think you need to be blind to see that something wrong is going on. This is a political coup. He also added, this is a contaminated process. We need to investigate the investigators. They didn't want the truth. They were after me personally. The news adds more uncertainty to Israel's political situation as the country remains without a coalition government.

Both Netanyahu and his rival, Benny Gantz, tied in September's election. Get ready for a cheerful Christmas spending fight. The Senate and the House have now both approved a new short-term spending deal that keeps the government funded until December 20th. However, there doesn't appear to be any compromise yet on how much to spend on the longer-term spending bills or what they should fund. Border wall funding is a major sticking point. Democrats are ramping up calls for President Trump to fire Stephen Miller, a senior advisor who oversees the president's immigration policy. Democrats say he's a documented white nationalist.

On Thursday, 107 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to President Trump demanding that he fired Miller. In the letter, they cite leaked emails first published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, in which Miller sent links to v.dair.com, a website associated with the alt-right and white nationalism. Miller's emails also reference a 1973 novel called The Camp of the Saints, which is about a non-white immigrant invasion of Europe. Congressional Democrats tried to tie those emails to Trump's present-day immigration policy, led by Miller. They said, Mr. Miller's documented hatred of Muslim immigrants shape your Muslim ban and sheds new light on your

administration's intent in writing that ban. According to the Washington Examiner, the White House did not immediately respond for comment. Does Europe have an anti-Semitism problem? A new poll commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League has concerning findings. The Anti-Defamation League says their poll shows about a quarter of Europeans and the 14 countries polled appear to be anti-Semitic. About four of ten Germans, Austrian, Spaniards, and Italians think Jews talk too much about the Holocaust. Jews' loyalty was also questioned with over 40% of Danes, Austrians, and Germans, saying Jews were more loyal to Israel than to their own countries. Up next, Hans von Spakovsky breaks down the latest in the impeachment hearings.

Americans have almost entirely forgotten their history. That's right, and if we want to keep our republic, this needs a change. I'm Jared Stepman and I'm Fred Lucas. We host The Right Side of History, a podcast dedicated to restoring informed patriotism and busting the negative narratives about America's past. Hollywood, the media, and academia have failed a generation. We're here to set the record straight on the ideas and people who've made this country great. Subscribe to the Right Side of History on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Stitcher today.

So we have survived, or at least ostensibly survived, another week of impeachment hearings, and joining me to discuss is Hans von Spikoski, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Hans, thanks for joining us. Sure, Katrina. Thanks for having me back on. All right. So before we get to the hearings, I want to talk about an interesting shift in rhetoric the left has made.

Right. We are no longer discussing quid pro quo. We are discussing bribery. Why have liberals shifted their rhetoric and is it significant? I don't think it's significant because there's so far been produced, no, evidence really of either one and the few witnesses who have talked about it dispute whether or not there was a quid pro quo. But apparently the reason for this is there was a report recently, a news report, that the DNC

found that a focus group that they had convened didn't really know what a quid pro quo was and they didn't think anything of it, whereas the word bribery sounds more sinister. So that apparently is why they have switched to using the term bribery. The one thing I will say is that what has come out so far doesn't even come close to meeting the requirements of the federal bribery statute. And what are the requirements of that statute? I mean, bribery, think of it in the common sense kind of term. You know, bribery is when, for example, a congressman is paid cash in order to vote a certain way on a bill. And, you know, the best example of that was, remember the abscam investigation, the FBI did early in 1970s where they caught congressmen doing that on tape.

But here, even if you assume what Democrats are claiming is true and they haven't proven it, all you have is a president. being concerned about corruption inside a foreign country, some of which may have involved a former vice president of the United States and his son who were obviously self-dealing in their business over there. And being concerned about corruption when we are providing that country with foreign aid, we're always concerned with corruption in countries that we provide with foreign aid. Not only that, but putting conditions on foreign aid. aid is the way we've always provided foreign aid.

So if we got a quid pro quo, well, that's what we try to do with. Every, every bill for foreign aid we give to foreign countries. So we've had roughly 30 gazillion hours of testimony this week, it feels like. Our reporter Fred Lucas has been glued to the hearings for hours and hours each day. Have we learned, and we'll get into some more of the specifics later, but first of all, have learned anything of importance that struck you from this week's hearings? No, I don't think so. Again, we had many witnesses talking about things they heard thirdhand.

Almost no one who had direct knowledge of what went on between the president and the President Trump and the president of Ukraine. And in fact, a lot of the discussions and testimony has been opinions, not facts, opinions and criticism of the way the president conducted foreign policy. Remember, earlier in the week we had a lieutenant colonel who was providing advice on the Ukraine to the National Security Council. And the biggest part of his testimony was that he didn't think the president used his talking points when he was having discussion of the Ukrainian president. Well, I hate to tell this lieutenant colonel, but it's the president who's the chief diplomat of the United States. And not only does he not have to follow the direction of junior officers in the Army, he also doesn't have to follow what the State Department says or the advice given by the State Department.

And that seems to have been most of the criticism by State Department officials is they didn't like the way the President was conducting our diplomatic relations with Ukraine. None of this amounts to an impeachable offense. So to get to specifics, Pod Save America tweeted out this MSNBC clip featuring David Holmes. a diplomat in Ukraine. This is, of course, a liberal podcast. It's run by former President Obama staffers. And they wrote in the tweet accompanying this, David Holmes becomes the 500th staffer

to lay out the quid pro quo between Trump and Ukraine. So let's play that clip. And then I want to see, I want to hear your response to it. Okay. Within a week or two, it became apparent that the energy sector reforms, the commercial deals, and the anti-corruption efforts on which we were making progress, were not making a dent in terms of persuading the White House to schedule a meeting between the presidents.

On June 27th, Ambassador Sondland told Ambassador Taylor in a phone conversation, the gist of which Ambassador Taylor shared with me at the time, that President Zelensky needed to make clear to President Trump that President Zelensky was not standing the way of, quote, investigations. I understood that this meant the Biden-Berizma investigations that Mr. Giuliani and his associates had been speaking about in the media since March. Well, Ambassador Taylor did not brief me on every detail of his communications with the Three Amigos. He did tell me that on a June 28th call with President Zelensky, Ambassador Taylor and the Three Amigos, it was made clear that some action on Burisma Biden investigation was a precondition for an Oval Office visit.

So what are your thoughts? Does that constitute proof? He understands that's what it was. You notice how careful his wording was. He didn't know it. He understands that that's what. it was. And I guess my reaction to that is, so what? It is a perfectly legitimate, and in fact, I would think people would want to know whether or not a prior vice president of the United States used the powers of his office to stop a corruption investigation of a Ukrainian company that had hired his son for a job for which he was getting paid an enormous amount of money, $50,000 a month, when he had no qualifications for that job, didn't speak the language. And I think

as admitted, and officials for the company admitted that the only reason they hired him was because he was a present son. And yet the vice president used the powers of his office to threaten to withhold aid unless a corruption investigation was stopped. That raises serious concerns about self-dealing by the Biden family. And why in the world would it be an impeachable offense for a president to say that we think that should be investigated. In fact, it should be. And if that's the kind of corruption that was happening, we would want it looked into. So my reaction to that is so what?

The other thing I could treat it just very quickly is, you know, my friend Andy McCarthy, who we recently had at the Heritage Foundation to talk about this. And on this podcast. He was a great guest. Right. You know, he's come up with this great term that I think describes his. very well. He calls it the Seinfeld impeachment. And the reason he calls it that is because he points out that the Ukrainians were given the aid we had promised them, aid that has provided

them with the kind of defensive weapons they need to fight against the Russians and Russian insurgents of the Obama administration refused to give them. Zelensky got his meeting with the president. And as far as we know, there was never actually any investigation conducted, and there was no public announcement of any investigation. So the reason he calls it the Seinfeld impeachment is nothing actually happened. Great show. So to return to something you said a little bit earlier in your answer, you pointed out, you know, it's reasonable for Hunter Biden and Joe Biden to be investigated in light of what occurred with, you know, the younger Biden getting this week. while his father was the vice president. The left seems to say that that in itself is an impeachable offense.

Is there a sort of a thought experiment here? I mean, what would it take, I think, for Trump to have done an impeachable offense? Would it have to have been him saying, I'm specifically looking into this only because I'm concerned about the 2020 election? Or is there anything he could have done that would have made this seem like an impeachable offense? If you look at, remember, the Democrats are now using the term bribery, right? Okay, if you look at the discussions at the Constitutional Convention about the impeachment clause,

and specifically you look at what they meant by bribery back then. Bribery would be if the president of Ukraine sent a personal cash payment to the president in order to get aid. That's bribery. asking that the president of Ukraine to take a look into possible corruption, that is not bribery. And in particular, what's so odd to me about this is contrast these two things. On the one hand, we have the vice president of the United States, former vice president, admitting on videotape that he threatened to withhold U.S. aid unless a corruption investigation was halted of his own family. versus the Democrats getting upset that this president wanted a corruption investigation conducted by this foreign country to look into that matter.

Now, which of those two is actual corruption and an actual problem? It's clear to me it's the first one. But, of course, the Democrats don't want any information coming out about this because, as you know, they refused Republican calls for Hunter Biden to come in and testify. about the over $3 million he got for being the vice president's son. Well, speaking of that, we might be at the end of hearings. The committee hasn't announced formally yet what they're going to do. But as you just said, the Democrats would not let Hunter Biden and a couple other figures Republicans wanted to testify, testify. Do you think that's a problem?

I think it is because, look, the one thing you can say about prior impeachment investigations, specifically talking about Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, is that the rules were set up in both of those to make it a bipartisan effort. You know, the minority parties in both of those instances were given the ability to also investigate, call witnesses they thought were important. Here, Democrats have totally denied Republicans the ability to not only bring in witnesses they want, but as you know, Adam Schiff has at times instructed witnesses not to answer the Republicans. question. All of that makes this look like a partisan political effort, not a real objective impeachment investigation. And if that's the way Democrats continue to do this, and they don't actually establish any real evidence of an impeachable offense, which is serious misconduct by

president, I think they're going to reap the political whirlwinds, and they're going to find that they are greatly critiqued by the American people. And they may suffer the consequences of that at the ballot box as Republicans did after they impeached Bill Clinton. So let's circle back to the hearings this week. What did you think of Ambassador Sondland's testimony on Wednesday? It seemed to me looking at Twitter that it was, I don't even know how to describe it. Like both the left and the right were circulating quotes by him, one in which he appears to say there was quid pro quo, one in which he appears to deny there was any quid pro quo. Was he contradicting himself?

Did he say anything of an importance? This seems to be the most crucial testimony we've had. He was inconsistent. And you cannot prove a case with a witness who is inconsistent and says one thing, one time, and something else the other time. Which time is it true? And that is the kind of inconsistency that a prosecutor in a criminal case. He would never put up a witness like that, a witness who is inconsistent in his testimony if he's trying to prove a case. So, again, I don't really think that Sondheim, that he, Sondland, sorry, I was thinking of the songster.

That would be a much fun, more fun testimony. That would be a fun more hearing, right. Again, I don't think he's made the case for the Democrats. and so far the evidence just does not meet the standard, the historical standard of showing serious misconduct by a president of such a nature that he should be removed immediately from office rather than waiting for the next election and letting the American people make the choice when they go to the voting booth. So let's talk about former aid to John Bolton, Fiona Hill,

and she testified on Thursday and dismissed the idea that Ukraine had been in any way involved in the 20s, election saying this. Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country and that perhaps somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016.

This is the public conclusion of our intelligence. insurgencies confirmed in bipartisan congressional reports. It is beyond dispute. So you, of course, fell elections pretty darn closely. Right. Is there any reason to believe Ukraine was involved in the 2016 election? Well, we don't know because it hasn't been really investigated. And, you know, with all due respect to Ms. Hill, these are the same intelligence agencies that she says, oh, it should be the final word on this. These are the same intelligence agencies that,

helped launch a surveillance operation against this president based on political opposition research that had not been checked and verified, based on a false claim that there had been collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. And these are the same intelligence communities, intelligence agencies where the whistleblower, which nobody wants to name, but everybody knows who it is, is a A CIA analyst who has engaged in is a Democratic activist. So frankly, her call that we should just trust the intelligence agencies on this. I think she and others have done great damage to their credibility.

So Hill mentioned, and she's far from the only one too, Rudy Giuliani's role in all this. He is, at this point, it doesn't look like he's going to testify. That could change. Right. What do you think of his conduct from what we know as Trump's personal lawyer and his engagement with Ukraine? Is there anything that we should be concerned about? I've heard some people try to claim that there was something wrong in this. And again, you know, my reaction to that is presidents are not required by the Constitution or any law to only use State Department officials.

They, presidents have used private individuals in many instances in the past to engage in foreign policy missions for them. There's nothing illegal or unlawful. You can, I guess you can debate the wisdom of it. But again, we're not supposed to be here talking about the wisdom of the president's conduct of foreign policy. That is not an impeachable offense. What we're supposed to be talking about is anything that was unlawful or illegal conduct. And the fact that Rudy Giuliani, as the president's personal lawyer, was talking to officials in Ukraine, there's nothing illegal about that. And it certainly is not impeachable.

It's very clear that really annoys State Department. State Department officials, which to me is actually a good thing given how many times in the past, state department officials. state department officials have acted in ways in which they seem to feel like the foreign countries they're stationed in are really their clients, not the United States. So do you want to wager any predictions on what happens next in the impeachment process? Oh, I think it's pretty likely that the House will vote to approve articles of impeachment because they've been wanted to do that since the first week the president was inaugurated. And they really don't care about what the evidence.

in shows or doesn't show. They're doing this. The way this has been conducted, the witnesses they have brought forward makes it look like this is really as a political stunt intended to try to damage the president in order to prevent him from getting reelected. It is not being conducted like an actual legitimate impeachment inquiry as prior impeachments have been. This is particularly true because I think Democrats should probably probably.

know, since they've not been able to produce any real evidence, that there's no way the Senate is going to convict the president and remove him from office when there's been no serious misconduct. So you mentioned the whistleblower. Do you think it is important that that person be known, be questioned? Yes. Yes, absolutely. Because, look, there is no more serious undertaking by the U.S. House of Representatives other than declaring war. except for impeachment. And if you are going to take what is a step that has only been attempted to be taken twice in American history to remove a president, duly chosen and elected by the American people, then there should be no anonymous accusers.

And I think we should not only make public who the whistleblower is. I think he should be called in as a witness as Republicans wanted and Adam Schiff refused because one of our most basic due process rights is the ability to confront your accuser. When you aren't able to do that, then that means that Adam Schiff and his committee are running this like a star chamber, not a proceeding in which they're actually trying to get at the truth. So to play devil's advocate here. Yeah. Does he need to face his accuser if the president already has a chance to respond to the accusations? Does it matter who made them? It does matter who made them because when someone makes accusations, it's not just the supposed facts that they're asserting.

It's their credibility. Can you believe what they're saying? Do they have credibility in the accusations they are making? I'm sure one of the reasons this particular whistleblower doesn't want his name to come out is because we know, for example, that the lawyer he hired two years ago was sending out tweets publicly talking about how they were going to organize a coup, a coup to take down this president. And that brings up a lot of questions about this whistleblower, his credibility, whether this is an organized effort to bring down this president. bring down the president where there's no real wrongdoing at issue, you know, who he's had contact with, including Adam Schiff and others, prior to even filing the whistleblower complaint. All of that's very important for us to be able to judge what is really going on here.

So to wrap up, how do you think history is going to view these impeachment hearings? And how do you think this could usher in a new era for the United States in the sense of, you know, I'm struck by how the media is always, always accusing the Trump administration of norm breaking, et cetera. But by your account, really, this impeachment process is a kind of norm breaking. Yeah, no, it is. And I think if Democrats continue to go forward with this, they are initiating a very dangerous precedent. I think historians are going to look at this the way they today look at the attempted impeachment of Andrew Johnson. You know, Andrew Johnson was the first president impeached by the House.

He was acquitted in the Senate. He was the vice president who took over when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. And historians all agree that that was an improper impeachment. They impeached him not because he had done anything wrong, but because they didn't like him and they didn't like his policies towards the southern states and they didn't like his attitude towards reconstruction. It was a purely political impeachment. They wanted to get rid of somebody they didn't like, not a president who would actually engage in any kind of misconduct.

And the parallels between that and what's going on today are actually kind of eerie. One of the paragraphs in the articles of impeachment of Johnson even complained about the president saying nasty things about Congress. Does that sound familiar, Katrina? Yeah, a little bit. I'm sorry, but saying nasty things about Congress. That is not an impeachable offense. At least Andrew Johnson didn't tweet, right? Well, Hans. Thanks so much for joining us.

Sure, thanks for having me. That's it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify, and please leave us a review or rating on iTunes to give us any feedback. Robin Virginia will be with you on Monday. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.

It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, the Leah Rampersad, and Mark Geinney. For more information, visit DailySignal.com.