The Daily - The Impeachment Dilemma for Republicans

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

Three past American presidents have confronted the possibility that members of their own party would support their impeachment. Only one, Richard M. Nixon, left office because of it, when Republicans eventually abandoned him. But what can we expect this time, in the impeachment inquiry of President Trump? Guests: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and an author of “Impeachment: An American History,” in conversation with Natalie Kitroeff, a business reporter for The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: The impeachment inquiry was prompted by a July call between President Trump and the Ukrainian leader. Details of a second call have now emerged, in which Mr. Trump pressed the Australian prime minister to help investigate the Mueller inquiry’s origins.In a news analysis, Peter Baker explains how preventing foreign influence is one of the oldest issues in America’s democratic experiment.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, just three U.S. presidents have confronted the possibility that members of their own party would support their impeachment. Only one left office because of it. My colleague Natalie Kitcherew talked to White House reporter Peter Baker about what to expect this time. It's Tuesday, October 1st.

Peter, walk us through the extraordinary circumstances of the only time a president facing impeachment left office under pressure from his own party, Richard Nixon. I refer, of course, to the investigations of the so-called Watergate affair. Well, this, of course, was two years into Watergate. There have been investigations for many, many months. I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough. And Nixon had basically survived it up until this point. And Republicans largely stayed with him.

What really finally did him in, what finally put things over the edge, was something they called the smoking gun tape. What did the president know and when did he know it? On July 16th, Alexander Butterfield, a former White House official, shocked the Senate Watergate committee by saying the president's conversations were on tape. And this particular tape of a conversation showed that Nixon, in fact, had ordered his aides to tell the CIA to block the FBI investigation into Watergate. In other words, he had directly ordered the cover-up. That was the bridge too far.

For the Republicans, that was the final straw. Congressman Rhodes and Senator Scott and I have just concluded a visit with the president. There's this dramatic moment when three senior Republicans from Congress, Barry Goldwater, John Rhodes, Hugh Scott, they come to the White House and they tell Nixon... We have told him that the situation is very gloomy

on Capitol Hill and that it is a very distressing situation. It's over. The time is up. He no longer has enough support to survive. He's not only going to be impeached by the House, but convicted by the Senate. He probably only has 10 Republican senators who are still willing to stand with him.

That's when they abandoned him, and it's only at that point did they abandon him. I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Which, of course, prompted him to resign. Rather than face the humiliation of impeachment and conviction by the Senate, he would short circuit the process in effect by saying, I give up. I'm out of here. To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the president and the Congress. So obviously there's a lot of similarities to that moment

and the one we're in now. You could argue that we have the proverbial smoking gun with the transcript that the White House itself released last week of Trump's call with the president of Ukraine. So why doesn't it seem like the same thing is happening now? Right. In fact, you heard House Democrats, when they read that rough transcript of the phone call, say it was a smoking gun. They used that term smoking gun. That is the smoking gun. I personally think that that document is the smoking gun. We should not be trying to find a secret smoking gun.

Donald Trump is the smoking gun. Evoking the Watergate parallel. What you didn't hear was a lot of Republicans say it. This was a normal conversation between two leaders. And we've got the president of Ukraine saying there was no pressure. Most of the Republicans said, no, I don't think this tells us enough about the president's interactions with Ukraine to suggest it was somehow nefarious. He simply made a request that the Ukrainians investigate corruption. There's no quid pro quo.

No talk about aid. No quid pro quo. The Democrat chairman themselves said there was no quid pro quo here. Quid pro quo, of course, would be if you do this, I'll do that. Or if you don't do this, something will happen or not happen. From my point of view, to impeach any president over a phone call like this

would be insane. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who's one of the president's closest allies, said, This seems to me like a political setup. It's all hearsay. You can't get a parking ticket conviction based on hearsay. The whistleblower didn't hear the phone call. Right. Who told the whistleblower about the phone call and everything

else? There was no there there. It was a nothing burger. He said it would have had to have been the president talking in kind of more of a thuggish voice, threatening the president of Ukraine that would have changed his mind. But since he didn't, he said that there's nothing there to call high crime a misdemeanor. What do you make of this exchange? You know, Kevin McCarthy, who's the House Republican leader, said on 60 Minutes, President Zelensky says we are almost ready to buy more javelins from the United States for defense purposes. And President Trump replies, I would like you to do us a favor, though. You just added another word. No. You said, I'd like you to do us a favor, though. You just added another word.

No, it's in the transcript. You said, I'd like you to do a favor, though? Yes, it's in the White House transcript. He tried to correct the interviewer as to the wording of the transcript, and in fact didn't realize what it actually said. I want you to do us a favor, though. And Kevin McCarthy didn't know that the word though had been in there and certainly hadn't fixated on it anyway as a particularly meaningful piece of evidence.

The difference here is that the smoking gun is not quite as smoking as it was in the case of Nixon. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Anyway, it hasn't been seen by both parties in the same way that the smoking gun tape was seen in 1974. So how does President Trump's approach to all of this compare to Nixon's? When the smoking gun tape came out in 1974, Nixon takes the hint. Rather than face the humiliation of impeachment and conviction by the Senate, he would short circuit the process in effect by saying, I give up, I'm out of here. And 25 years later, when Bill Clinton faced impeachment... I did not have sexual relations with that woman,

Ms. Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. He absolutely refused to resign. A lot of Democrats would have liked him to. They were very unhappy with what he had done. They thought he had brought shame to the office and had damaged the party. I will continue to do the work of the American people. We still, after all, have to save Social Security and Medicare for the 21st century.

But Clinton showed something different. He showed that if you just simply stick it out, if you simply aren't ashamed, if you don't let embarrassment or ridicule or constant battering drive you out, that you can probably bluff your way into holding on to office. I have accepted responsibility for what I did wrong in my personal life. The question is, what are we going to do now? And Clinton said basically to Congress, I dare you, try it. Try to take me down because you can't. So if you're Trump and you're looking at that history, there's a strong case for following Clinton's lead, not Nixon's, and being defiant in the face of all this pressure.

Yeah, that's exactly right. In fact, you know, I wrote a book about Clinton's impeachment called The Breach. And while I was doing the research for it, I interviewed a couple Republicans who had been pretty key in investigating Watergate. Howard Baker, who was the senator, and Fred Thompson, who was the Republican counsel. And both of them told me in a separate interview, something I was really struck by, they both said that if Nixon had followed Clinton's example and refused to quit, he may never have been removed. That in fact, if he'd actually gutted it out and called the Senate's bluff, he might still have won the day. And I think that shows you how

much it changed since the 1970s in terms of our politics and particularly the politics of impeachment. Peter, it feels worth noting that what you're pointing out is that the congressional process has never actually removed a president during impeachment. We think of the Nixon story as an example of bipartisan action on this, but it wasn't quite that. That's exactly right. In the end, Nixon gave up. And the question is whether in today's political environment, whether there could ever be a moment where a two-third majority in the Senate that would have to compose members of both parties would ever agree to remove a president. Up until now, anyway, the American public has not been interested in an impeachment of President Trump.

That may be beginning to change. CBS, in fact, over the weekend, they found that 55 percent of Americans now support an impeachment inquiry. And that's the first time a majority of Americans have done that. So that changed the dynamics a little bit. But if you're a Republican, the more important number is probably the number of Republicans who support the president at this point, which is still in the 80 to 90 percent range in most polls. In other words, the president is still very popular with Republican core voters. So what you're saying is it might not matter to Republicans that much that the broader public opinion has shifted toward favoring an impeachment inquiry. It's not the most important thing. I mean, what's changed in the last 20 years

since the Clinton impeachment, the last 40-some years since the Nixon impeachment, is the parties have really become more and more homogenized so that there really are just conservatives in the Republican Party and just liberals in the Democratic Party and not a lot of people in the middle anymore.

And they're running in districts where the greater threat is that you lose your seat to somebody on your flank, not that you lose swing voters in the middle anymore. And they're running in districts where the greater threat is that you lose your seat to somebody on your flank, not that you lose swing voters in the middle, right? So if you're a Republican, you're more concerned that you lose the support of conservatives than you do that you lose the support of independents or moderates. And that means that your incentive structure is to stay with a president who is popular with the core voters. Can you think of a single Republican senator who seems likely to break from the party in this moment? I think you can imagine a scenario if the House were to impeach and if there continued to be

some revelations that were damaging to the president in which a handful of Republican senators might vote against the president. I did read the transcript. You know, Mitt Romney has expressed his concern over what's happening with Ukraine. It remains troubling in the extreme. It's deeply troubling. Senator Ben Sasse has said,

quote, Republicans ought not be rushing to circle the wagons and say there's no there there when there's obviously a lot that's very troubling there. This stuff is troubling. I don't think either one of them is at the moment ready to declare that they would be for removal from office, but a handful of them at least would be potentially open to that possibility if the fact set presented itself. It's hard to see 20. And why is that number relevant? Well, let's just remember how impeachment works, of course.

Impeachment starts in the House of Representatives, and it requires a majority of members of the House to vote to impeach the president for high crimes and misdemeanors. Now, that's like an indictment. It's a charge, in effect, that the president has committed crimes against the republic, if you will. in effect that the president has committed crimes against the republic, if you will. If the House majority were to pass an impeachment article against the president, it then goes to the Senate. The Senate would then, in theory, put the president on trial. The trial would, if the Clinton precedent were to hold, bring members of the House over who had voted to impeach the president. William Jefferson Clinton has committed high crimes and misdemeanors.

Convict him and remove him. To serve as prosecutors, if you will. They call them managers. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office. And then the president would be entitled to bring lawyers of his own to the Senate floor to defend him.

We're here today because the president suffered a terrible moral lapse. a marital infidelity, not a breach of the public trust, not a crime against society. And then the evidence would be presented and the Senate would vote. Now, to actually convict the president and remove him from office would require a two-thirds vote. Now, in this Senate, that would mean 67 votes. Because there are, in fact, only 47 Democrats, that means you need at least 20 Republican senators to vote to convict.

Otherwise, the president would be acquitted and he would remain in office for the rest of his term. And Peter, do we know for sure that Mitch McConnell is going to have a trial? Well, it's a great question people have been asking over the last few days because, you know, he, of course, didn't have a vote on Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination in 2016. So a lot of people say, well, maybe he would just simply declare that he wouldn't take it up. But he actually just said on Monday. I would have no choice but to take it up. How long you're on it is a whole different matter. But I would have no choice but to take it up. How long you're on it is a whole different matter,

but I would have no choice but to take it up based on a Senate rule on impeachment. The Constitution doesn't require him to take it up. The Constitution says the Senate has the power to try a president. But the Senate rules do specifically say that if the House impeaches a president, that the Senate must take it up the very next day. Now, what kind of trial it would be, we don't know. You could open the trial, and then a supporter of the president,

or even Mitch McConnell himself, could introduce a motion to dismiss the case on the basis that there is no evidence or not enough evidence or that that doesn't seem likely to get to a two-thirds vote, so why bother to belabor the process? You could have this motion to dismiss, and then that could be passed by a majority of the Senate. And then, in fact, the trial would be over. They tried this during the Clinton case. It didn't work. So there is some precedent for it. The truth is there have only been two Senate trials of a president in our history, one in 1868, one in 1999. Both times,

they kind of made it up as they went along because there is no rule book for this. So you can imagine that we will be making it up as we go along all over again. We'll be right back. So McConnell is indicating that he's willing to hold this Senate trial, but we don't know exactly how it's going to go down. And in any case, all signs are pointing to the Senate acquitting Trump. Right, exactly. Something drastic would have to change, presumably, like, for instance, the economy going bad, the president's poll numbers going south in a serious way, not just across the board, but also with Republicans. numbers going south in a serious way, not just across the board, but also with Republicans. Things like that would probably have to happen in order to see such a drastic defection from the Republican caucus in the Senate.

So given those dynamics, what is the GOP's strategy for talking about this phone call and the whistleblower's allegations to voters? Well, one thing they're trying to do is to make it out as if this is strictly a radical effort by disgruntled Democrats who never got over losing the 2016 election. They're angry about the 2016 election, and ultimately they're angry at the voters. They're angry that the voters elected President Trump.

All of this from day one. From day one, they have been wanting to get this president out of office. To, in effect, have a coup d'etat against President Trump. All of this from day one. From day one, they have been wanting to get this president out of office. To, in effect, have a coup d'etat against President Trump. You see email after email, attack after attack on individual Democrats from supporting an impeachment inquiry. Her extreme left is angry. They're marching in the street with pitchforks and torches. Congresswoman so-and-so has given in to the radical socialist left of her party, or Congressman so-and-so is just part of a mob attack on the president. So they're trying to turn it on the Democrats. They also, of course, want to focus on Joe Biden.

Everywhere Joe Biden goes, his son follows and gets millions of dollars from the government. The president is right to ask for an investigation. You don't hear them say, hey, everything the president did was fine, there's no problem here, and here's the reason why. They prefer to attack his accusers. And there's a parallel there, right, with what the Democrats were saying in the late 90s about the GOP and its obsession with Clinton.

Yeah, that's exactly right. They didn't want to go around defending Clinton. They didn't think that Clinton was worth defending in the sense of what he had done, but they did want to attack the Republicans by saying they had gone too far. The great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it

and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president. They caved into the right-wing extremists of their party. They were obsessed with sex. And this was a wholly illegitimate effort. Mr. Speaker, Republicans,

put your country before your party. So while the subject matter of the two impeachments was starkly different, some of the tone and the rhetoric you're hearing, there is some parallel. Peter, it strikes me that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats had to have known all of this would be the case

when they decided to move forward with the impeachment inquiry. So why, in their minds, was it the right thing to do? Yeah, it's a great question because up until now, Nancy Pelosi has not been interested in doing an impeachment. She was there as a member of the Congress in 1998.

We are here today because the Republicans in the House are paralyzed with hatred of President Clinton. And until the Republicans free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer. Didn't think it worked out too well for the Republicans. Tonight on C-SPAN, Campaign 98 results. A party line impeachment didn't help the Republicans at the polls in 1998. Democrats had a much better day than anybody would have expected a few weeks ago.

And also was seen by history as kind of somewhat less than a noble effort. And she didn't want the Democrats to be seen as partisan attackers of Trump who can't get over their hatred of him so they impeach him. But when this one came up, it just broke the dam. It's just finally, OK, we've got to do something here. And I think that the speaker felt she had no choice but to move ahead. But I guess what I mean is if the Democrats knew that impeachment basically never ends with a president leaving office, and the idea that Trump would leave of his own volition like Nixon is highly unlikely, then this impeachment story seems potentially more likely to go the way of Clinton, despite the presence of what the Democrats are calling a smoking gun.

At the moment, that's right. But the difference is that both Nixon and Clinton were in their second terms, right? They were not going to serve more than a couple more years no matter what. still and they will decide whether to keep him there or because they'll decide to throw him out or because maybe he will be removed from office and we'll be having Vice President Pence standing up as the nominee for the Republican Party. There's a lot of different options here, but I think that really we're seeing something that's different than any previous impeachment battle that we've seen. Voters didn't get a chance to vote on Bill Clinton directly after his impeachment trial. They didn't get a chance to vote on Richard Nixon at all. Andrew Johnson didn't even get his party nomination, so he didn't run after his impeachment trial.

So this is the first time, assuming President Trump doesn't leave office, that voters will render a judgment on a president shortly after an impeachment and a trial, assuming they happen. And so I think we have transformed the conversation that we're about to have for the next 13 months. Peter, thank you so much. Thank you. The Times reports that President Trump

pressured another foreign leader for a political favor in recent weeks. During a phone call with the Prime Minister of Australia, Trump pushed for help to discredit the special counsel's Russia investigation. Afterward, the White House restricted access to records of the call, just as it did to the transcript

of the President's July call to the leader of Ukraine. On Monday, House Democrats issued their second subpoena related to that call, this time to the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, seeking his private communications with the president. Mr. President, do you now know who the whistleblower is, sir? Well, we're trying to find out about a whistleblower. We have a whistleblower that reports things that were incorrect.

At the White House, President Trump said he was eager to identify the whistleblower, despite legal protections specifically designed to keep the whistleblower anonymous. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, California's governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a law allowing college athletes at public and private universities to sign endorsement deals with major companies. A decision that could ultimately transform the economics of college sports. Billions and billions of dollars, 14-plus billion dollars,

goes to these universities, goes to these colleges, billion-plus revenue to the NCAA themselves. And the actual product, the folks that are putting their lives on the line, putting everything on the line, are getting nothing. Under current rules, such deals are prohibited, a system that has allowed universities and TV networks to profit from college sports, but prevented the athletes themselves from earning money. It's going to initiate dozens of other states

introduce similar legislation. And it's going to change college sports for the better by having now the interests, finally, of the athletes on par with the interests of the institutions. Now we're rebalancing that power arrangement. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.