The Daily - A Louder, Messier Phase of Impeachment

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

The House Intelligence Committee has released its impeachment report to the Judiciary Committee, signaling the end of one phase of impeachment and the beginning of another. Today, we break down the report and explore why those two phases will look so different. Guest: Julie Hirschfeld Davis, the congressional editor of The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading:The House Intelligence Committee released its impeachment report this week, concluding that President Trump tried to “use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election.” Here are our key takeaways from the report.Confused by what happens next? Our step-by-step guide to the impeachment process has you covered.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Today, the House Intelligence Committee has released its impeachment report to the Judiciary Committee, signaling the end of one phase of impeachment and the beginning of another. Julie Davis on why those two phases will look so different.

It's Wednesday, December 4th. Julie, tell me about these two phases of the House impeachment inquiry. Well, the House Intelligence Committee has just finished its report and completed its work. And now the House Judiciary Committee has its job to do. And these are two very different committees. The House Intelligence Committee is a very sort of buttoned up, frequently less partisan place. They deal in matters of intelligence. They oversee the intelligence community. They deal in state secrets. And because of that... Committee has been extensively briefed on these efforts over a regular basis as a part of our ongoing oversight responsibility over the... It attracts sort of the workhorse members who are into dealing with long reports,

really meaty, substantive issues, oftentimes behind closed doors, not in front of the news cameras. The ranking member and I believe it is important to hold an open hearing today, and we don't do a tremendous amount of those. Dilatory tactics, parliamentary stunts, that sort of thing just doesn't happen that often in the Intelligence Committee because that's just not what they're about. The Judiciary Committee will come to order and without objection, the chair is authorized to declare recesses of the committee at any time. The Judiciary Committee, on the other hand, is kind of known for that. And the Judiciary Committee oversees the federal courts and the Justice Department, but it also has jurisdiction over cultural hot button issues. We welcome everyone to this morning's hearing on Planned Parenthood Exposed, examining the horrific abortion practices at the nation's largest abortion provider.

It has jurisdiction over questions of abortion rights, over gun rights. I ask my colleagues on this committee, both Republicans and Democrats, to stand up with me in supporting this legislation. We have to save lives. Some of the things that typically draw the most sort of fervent responses from both parties. And so it attracts members who want to engage in that level of really partisan debate. People who really seek out the spotlight, who want to engage in the culture war type of subjects that come before the Judiciary Committee, they sort of excel in these

very highly partisan public debates. These debates that happen in the Judiciary Committee are typically much more raucous, much more freewheeling, and it's a much more partisan place. So crude summary here. The Intelligence Committee is dominated by rule-oriented readers, the workhorses. The Judiciary Committee is more dominated by cultural warriors, the show horses. That's right. And to be clear, there is some overlap between the two committees. There are people who serve on both committees. And it's not like everyone on the Judiciary Committee is, you know, guns blazing culture warrior, and everyone on the Intelligence Committee is a dry consumer of like long

intelligence reports. But that is the profile of these two committees. And those tend to be the sorts of people who seek out seats on the Intelligence and the Judiciary Committee. So there is kind of a cultural difference there. So explain how these different roles of these two committees are actually playing out in this impeachment inquiry. Let's start with the Intelligence Committee, since its work has just been completed. How is its broader role, its rules, and its mission reflected in the work of the impeachment inquiry over the past few weeks? Well, the Intelligence Committee is used to working in secret, working in a setting where

you're controlling the flow of information, because by definition, they're dealing with intelligence matters, and that can't be debated freely, you know, on the House floor and the halls. And its procedures also reflect that there is less opportunity for the minority party to kind of shut down the proceedings, because if they were allowed to do that, that could be dangerous. I mean, that has actual implications potentially for national security. So the very rules of the committee they're used to operating under are just tighter by definition. And you saw Adam Schiff, the chairman of the committee, really using that to his advantage when it came to controlling the witness list, having a say in who Republicans would be able to call as public witnesses.

So Republicans, for instance, wanted to call Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, which Democrats knew that that would sort of be a red herring. And so they did not sign off on calling Hunter Biden. They did allow Republicans to call some witnesses. on calling Hunter Biden. They did allow Republicans to call some witnesses. We saw them call Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, and Tim Morrison,

who was a former National Security Council official. So they didn't shut them down altogether. But again, the committee operates in this way where the rights of the minority are prescribed such that they can't just do anything they want whenever they want. And what about the witnesses who the Democrats wanted to call? How did they use the Intelligence Committee's rules to their advantage?

Well, they were very careful to design a process where the lawyers for each side would be doing or could be doing the bulk of the questioning. So that was a concerted move on the part of Adam Schiff, the chairman. We'll now move to the 45-minute rounds. I recognize myself and majority counsel for 45 minutes. To have long, substantive rounds of essentially evidence gathering, taking the testimony and laying it out in a public way, rather than having lawmakers take turns and have it be a free-for-all of people trying to get their, you know, five minutes of sound bites in. And then when Republicans did try to kind of upend things. I know, Ms. Stefanik, you had a few quick questions

for the ambassador. I'll yield to you, Ms. Stefanik. Thank you, Mr. Nunes. Ambassador Yovanovitch, thank you for being here today. Schifferly shut them down. There was a moment, a couple of hearings in where Elise Stefanik, Republican congresswoman from New York, who Republicans wanted to spotlight, particularly because that day they were hearing from a female witness, the former Ukraine ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, and they knew they were going to be accused of sort of berating her and hammering at her. And she's a woman and, you know, sort of mansplaining her. And so they really wanted Stefanik to have the spotlight.

The gentlewoman was suspended. What is the interruption for this time? It is our time. The gentlewoman was suspended. You're not recognized. Mr. Nunes, you are minority counsel. I just recognize. Under the House Residence 660, you are not allowed to yield time except to minority counsel. The ranking member yielded time to another member of Congress. They tried to yield time to her, and Schiff just shut it down.

You're gagging the young lady from New York? That is accurate. Ambassador Yovanovitch, I want to thank you for being here today. Gentlewoman will suspend. You're not recognized. Right, and the rules would protect this sort of thing, theoretically, so that a member of the minority party on the Intelligence Committee wouldn't, say, bring up the location of American CIA agents overseas. Right. And granted, these issues that were coming up in the impeachment hearings were not strictly intelligence matters.

There wasn't necessarily a risk that anyone was going to go blabbing about black sites. But the rules that they were using were designed for those sorts of things. And so we saw Chairman Schiff take pretty good advantage of that. Right. Not that a bookish member of the Intelligence Committee would ever do such a thing, but just in case. Just in case. So the Republicans kind of get sidelined in this process because of these rules and the way the committee enforces them. What was the outcome for the Democrats who were overseeing this?

Well, the outcome was very much as they had hoped it would be. They really were able to use the process to get what they needed out of the witnesses that they called. Was there a quid pro quo? With regard to the requested White House call and the White House meeting, the answer is yes. They laid out this narrative. It would be funny if it wasn't such a graphic betrayal of the president's oath of office. Accusing the president of having abused his power. Can we also agree that it's just wrong? Yes.

And narratives from people who were there at key moments. Colonel Vindman, what was your real-time reaction to hearing that call? Hearing his phone call with the president of Ukraine. I knew that I had to report this to the White House counsel. I had concerns and it was my duty to report. Saying in front of a committee room that, you know, everyone was in the loop. Was in the loop. This came directly from the president.

At the express direction of the president of the United States. We were following the president's orders. So we followed the president's orders. And basically got the information that they needed and the predicate for laying out a case against President Trump that could be grounds for impeachment. We are going to House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff for the news conference on the impeachment committee report.

Which brings us to Tuesday. Right. So on Tuesday, the House Intelligence Committee was ready to release its report and send it over to the House Judiciary Committee. So they put together this 300-page report, lots of footnotes, release it publicly. report, lots of footnotes, release it publicly, and then Adam Schiff, the committee chairman, goes to the press gallery in the Capitol and lays it all out. This report chronicles a scheme by the president of the United States to coerce an ally, Ukraine, that is at war with an adversary, Russia, into doing the president's political dirty work. It involves a scheme in which Donald Trump withheld official acts, a White House meeting, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars of needed military assistance in order to compel that power to deliver two investigations that

he believed would assist his reelection campaign. And he raises this question again of whether people should have to accept that this is conduct that the president is allowed to engage in and essentially lays out the predicate for what they're going to give to the Judiciary Committee. With that, I'm happy to respond to your questions. Then Schiff takes questions from reporters, and the first question is about essentially the only really new thing that is not familiar to people who watch the hearings. When did you obtain the cell phone records that are in this report? and various White House officials, including John Bolton, the former national security advisor, but also Devin Nunes, who is the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee,

and his contacts with Lev Parnas, who is an associate of Rudy Giuliani, who was also pushing for the ouster of the Ukrainian ambassador who the president wanted gone. But certainly the phone records show that there was considerable coordination among the parties, including the White House. You're telling me, though, that we just learned in this report that the leading Republican on the Intelligence Committee was communicating and perhaps coordinating with the White House and the president's lawyer months ago and communicating with key figures involved in the pressure campaign that that very committee he's on is supposed to be investigating.

Correct. It's pretty stunning information, although we don't know what was discussed in those calls. All we have is time stamps and phone numbers. And so it's tough to reconstruct what the substance of those calls were, but it's a pretty unusual situation all around. It is, I think, deeply concerning that at a time when the president of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity. Julie, what's your understanding of why, given the juiciness of what you just described,

the House Intelligence Committee is kind of closing shop and handing all its work over to the Judiciary Committee rather than continuing to figure out what just happened with Nunes and with everything else in the report. Well, Schiff says that he basically is not closing up shop. There are still questions about these calls and also other broader issues like, did this pressure campaign actually begin much earlier with the previous president of Ukraine that they still want answered. But what he says is that there is more investigative work to be done. Even as we believe that we cannot wait because the president's efforts to secure intervention in the next election persist,

we continue our investigation and we will. The president's efforts to get a foreign power to interfere in the 2020 election are ongoing. And so we need to move. We need to get this thing going. And what he doesn't say, but what is also the case, is that the outcome here is pretty much known, at least in the House. They are very likely to draft articles of impeachment, to vote them through, to send the matter to the Senate. And Democrats believe that they have the evidence that they need to do that. And so this is the moment, they think, to get this thing moving.

And so now the work of the Judiciary Committee begins. Right. And on paper, they have a very simple and very somber task of taking this lengthy report and deciding whether this rises to the level of impeachable offenses, whether under the Constitution this is something that warrants the president's removal. But remember, this is the Judiciary Committee. This is the messier, more partisan culture war committee, and nobody expects for this to be a very orderly or buttoned down process. We'll be right back. Julie, the impeachment inquiry is now in the hands of the Judiciary Committee.

What makes it a messier place than the Intelligence Committee? Well, the rules of the Judiciary Committee are written for very different reasons than the rules of the Intelligence Committee are. They're written to sort of facilitate these freewheeling debates about policy and legislation and various matters that are of great interest to the public. So the minority has a lot of ability to interrupt the proceedings, to make points of order, to use parliamentary tactics to essentially make itself heard. tactics to essentially make itself heard. Given that, and also given the members of the committee, it's sort of culturally a place of much more backing and forthing and a pretty lively one. It feels like you're saying that the best days of the impeachment inquiry for Democrats are now behind them. Well, it depends on your perspective. I think for some lawmakers, they have been waiting with great anticipation to kind of have their moment to publicly sort of say their piece about what they think about President Trump's conduct, whether they're Democrats and want to outline how egregiously horrible they think this has been, or Republicans and want to defend everything that the president has done. And for the rest of the Democratic caucus, I do think that there is some degree of worry that, you know, now is the part

where things get really messy, where all of the talk of somber, you know, state debating kind of goes out the window. And here we are in the Judiciary Committee having kind of a food fight. Right. Nancy Pelosi is forever using this phrase. This is a somber, prayerful moment and process. And you're saying it's not going to be prayerful in that committee room. Probably will not look like most people's image of prayerful. And what specifically will the Judiciary Committee be doing when it comes to determining the constitutionality of this impeachment inquiry? Well, their first step is to hold a hearing today with constitutional scholars who will basically testify about the history of impeachment,

precedents for impeachment, and really what the definition is of an impeachable offense. And it's not necessarily straightforward. It's not straightforward at all. The Constitution doesn't say very much about what a president or another official could be impeached for. There are certain phrases in there like high crimes and misdemeanors that have been hotly debated by legal scholars. So is a high crime a particularly egregious actual crime, or is it wrongdoing by a high official? That's something that they're going to have to work out. And on Tuesday, we saw the Democrats start to signal what their argument is going to be about sort of what counts as impeachable and that it doesn't have to be a crime. They quoted Alexander Hamilton in the Intelligence Committee report explaining that

impeachment is not only designed to cover criminal violations, but also crimes against the American people. And they quote Hamilton saying, the subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may, with peculiar propriety, be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. They don't write like that anymore? No, for better or for worse. And is this always how the Judiciary Committee functions during an impeachment?

I mean, calling constitutional scholars, professors, historians, to basically ruminate on the very nature of what is impeachable. The purpose of today's hearing is to receive testimony from legal and constitutional scholars on the background and history of impeachment. Well, the Judiciary Committee did do this same thing back just before they started impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. The most important question to this committee is the meaning of high crimes and misdemeanors. It is important to remember that the word high and high crimes and misdemeanors was used to emphasize that it was a crime or misdemeanor against the Commonwealth. And part of it is just laying out sort of the reference points for them to be able to go back

to, to say, remember when these people who studied the Constitution and told us what it was all about and told us what impeachment was for said about what we should be considering? And so it's a way for them to kind of give the public a concept of why they would be doing this. I get how the rules vary here in ways that would make the Judiciary Committee a messier process than the Intelligence Committee? But I'm honestly kind of having a hard time imagining how interviewing constitutional scholars gets all that messy.

Well, it has to do with what they're interviewing the scholars about and the very, very different places that the Republicans and Democrats on the committee are coming from about that issue, they're essentially going to be arguing over the Constitution and trying to compete with one another to elicit from these constitutional scholars the most favorable interpretation of what impeachment means and what the standard is for their side. So rather than sort of arguing over who said what in a phone call with the Ukrainian president or whether civil servants' view of what President Trump did is legitimate or not legitimate. They're actually going to be arguing over the Constitution itself and what those words, those few words that are in the Constitution about impeachment actually mean in the context of what President Trump has done. Julie, you've said that it's widely understood that the House is going to vote to impeach the president. That's one of the reasons Schiff was in such a

hurry to move this from the Intelligence Committee over to the Judiciary Committee. So what are these two different phases that you've been describing? Why do they ultimately matter? I mean, why does it matter that the Intelligence Committee ran this as a tightly controlled, buttoned-up process, and that it's likely to get a lot messier in the Judiciary Committee if we know the outcome of all this basically beforehand. Because I think there is a broader question of what does impeaching a president look like when it's a purely partisan exercise. The Democrats opened this process with what was essentially a partisan vote to begin an impeachment inquiry. And if they engage now in a spectacle, in a sort of war on the public stage over impeaching the president, they're very aware that they could lose whatever

public support they do have for going forward with this, and that people could come away thinking that they have not been conscientious about what their constitutional duty is, that they've sort of abused their positions and treated impeachment just like another partisan fight that they have with President Trump that essentially would trivialize the process, both in the eyes of the public and sort of in the eyes of history. This is, after all, a process that's enshrined in the Constitution, and Democrats don't want to be the ones who are blamed with kind of tainting that process and undermining it. So there is a real risk for them that in this realm that they're about to enter,

that they're going to come off looking like less than they should. Right. They could undermine what the Intelligence Committee seemed to have pulled off, in part because of the rules that allowed for it, that gave the power to the majority and therefore allowed them to conduct that first phase in a way that seemed kind of high-minded and, as Nancy Pelosi would say, prayerful.

Right. They largely hit their mark in the first phase of this inquiry, and now they are keenly aware that having demonstrated to the public that they are taking this seriously, that they are being disciplined about how they're going about it, that they're honoring the process, that it could all unravel. Thank you, Julie. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

I've taken stock and I've looked at this from every angle. And over the last few days, I have come to one of the hardest decisions of my life. Senator Kamala Harris of California, who began her presidential campaign as a top-tier candidate with record crowds, has dropped out of the race. So here's the deal, guys. My campaign for president simply does not have the financial resources to continue. Saying that she no longer has the money required to remain competitive. In good faith, I cannot tell you, my supporters and volunteers, that I have a path forward if I don't believe I do. Harris has struggled to articulate a clear political ideology in a race dominated by liberals and moderates, and oversaw a campaign team with warring factions that couldn't agree on a strategy.

And... Would you like some nice ISIS fighters? You can take everyone you want. For 45 minutes on Tuesday, President Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron engaged in a series of tense televised exchanges about their approach to ISIS, NATO and trade policy during a meeting in London. It is true that you have foreign fighters coming from Europe, but this is a tiny minority of the overall problem we have in the region. Unlike many foreign leaders who quietly endure Trump's taunts, Macron repeatedly jabbed back at Trump, resulting in several testy back and forths. This is why he's a great politician, because that was one of the greatest non-answers I've ever heard. And that's OK. Because sometimes... That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro.

See you tomorrow.