The Daily - The Latest: The Mueller Question

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

To mention the Mueller report in articles of impeachment against President Trump, or not? That’s the question Democrats have been asking. Today’s impeachment hearing before the House Judiciary Committee gave us a clue about which way they’re leaning.“The Latest” is a series on the impeachment inquiry, from the team behind “The Daily.” You can find more information about it here.

It started with a whistleblower's complaint about President Trump's contact with a foreign leader. I had a perfect phone call with the president of Ukraine. Like, I mean perfect. Today I am asking our chairman to proceed with articles of impeachment. You need to call balls and strikes the right way. You don't interrupt either one of them, Chairman. You're the questioner or the witness. Bang it harder. It still doesn't make the point that you're not doing it right. It's Julie Davis in the Washington Bureau of the New York Times.

Today, the House Judiciary Committee took the next step in building an impeachment case against Donald Trump. As they worked toward drafting articles of impeachment, they heard from attorneys who work for the two congressional committees leading this charge. We will hear 30-minute opening arguments from counsels for the majority and minority of this committee. Lawyers from the Judiciary Committee, which has been thinking about impeachment for months. Then we will hear 45-minute presentations

of evidence from majority and minority counsel from the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. And from the Intelligence Committee, which wrapped up its work last week investigating this Ukraine matter. They're recapping for the Judiciary Committee everything that's come out of the hearing so far. So the committee can figure out if they can translate that into actual articles of impeachment, and if so, what they should say. Mr. Burke is recognized. The same rule continues. Mr. Burke has the floor. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Collins, and all the members. There was Barry Burke, the lawyer who's been working with Judiciary since February to investigate whether Trump abused his power and obstructed justice. He started with this anecdote about his young son as a way to boil this whole investigation down. Before I had the great honor of being a counsel

for this committee, my young son asked me a question. He said, Dad, does the president have to be a good person? Like many questions by young children, it had a certain clarity, but it was hard to answer. I said, Son, it is not a requirement that the president be a good person, but that is the hope. It is a requirement that the president be a person who does not abuse his power. And if you're discussing this with a kid, the simplest explanation is that the president can be a bad guy. That's not what this is about, Burke says. But he can't be a corrupt person, somebody putting his own interests

ahead of the country's interests. It is a requirement that the president not be a person who acts as though he is above the law in putting his personal and political interests above the nation's interests. That is the lesson of the Constitution. That is the lesson of the founders. And then the committee also heard from Daniel Goldman, who's the Democratic lawyer on the House Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating the Ukraine affair. Mr. Goldman, you may begin.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And he has sort of the line of the day about how the president's ongoing efforts to get a foreign country's help in his reelection effort amounted to what he called a clear and present danger to our free and fair elections and to our national security. That's just the starkest way you can put that. is described in detail in a nearly 300-page document entitled The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report, formerly transmitted from the House Permanent Selecting Committee on Intelligence to this committee a few days ago. But the latest, and the thing that jumped out at me, is what didn't come up much at this hearing, which gives us a clue about what's coming next.

There's been this behind-the-scenes debate among Democrats over how broad to make the articles of impeachment. about what's coming next. There's been this behind-the-scenes debate among Democrats over how broad to make the articles of impeachment. Stick to the Ukraine stuff or broaden it out to include whether the president obstructed justice when he tried to shut down Bob Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Mueller report laid out all these instances of potential obstruction, some of them pretty clear cut. And the question for Democrats now is, as long as we're going down the road of impeachment, do we pick up where Mueller left off or jettison all that work and just focus on Ukraine? The integrity of our next election is at stake. Nothing could be more urgent.

And we got a big clue here that it'll be the latter. Yes, there was some mention of Russian interference, broad allusions to it. Both Burke and Jerry Nadler, the Judiciary Committee chairman, said there's a pattern here of the president actively seeking help in elections. The president welcomed foreign interference in our elections in 2016. He demanded it for 2020.

Then he got caught. This pattern of conduct represents a continuing risk to the country. But it seems to be there for context, not as the predicate for bringing a separate actual article of impeachment on obstruction of justice. Now, it may still figure into the articles of impeachment in some way, maybe rolled into a charge about obstruction of congressional investigations, including the Ukraine matter. But right now, given the testimony we heard today about Barry Burke telling his son a president can't abuse his power, about the danger to our elections, about the danger to national security,

it seems like Democrats are going to keep impeachment tightly focused, as many of their more moderate members are asking them to. So that's the latest from Washington. Next, the House Judiciary Committee will propose its articles of impeachment and reconvene as early as Wednesday to debate and vote to send them to the full House.