The Daily - The Likelihood of Impeachment

Episode Date: June 25, 2019

In the weeks since the Mueller report, nearly 80 House Democrats have called for impeaching the president. But with the 2020 campaign underway, the likelihood of such action appears to be fading. That may be exactly what some Democratic leaders want. Guests: Peter Baker, who covers the White House for The New York Times, spoke with Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat and a member of the House Judiciary Committee. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: In a House that can be dominated by voices on the left, centrist freshman Democrats who flipped seats in 2018 may have the final say on impeachment.Here’s a refresher on how impeachment works.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, in the weeks since the Mueller report, nearly 80 House Democrats have called for impeaching the president. But with the 2020 campaign now underway, that likelihood appears to be fading. now underway, that likelihood appears to be fading. Why that may be exactly what some Democratic leaders want. It's Tuesday, June 25th. Peter Baker, you've been covering Washington for decades. I wonder how you're thinking about the

Democratic Party debate in this moment about whether to impeach President Trump. Well, no topic has consumed Democrats lately more than the idea of impeaching President Trump. And no topic has probably divided them anymore either. And I've been curious lately about that. What's going on with the Democrats and why are they not moving forward, it seems like, with impeachment? And so how did you decide to approach it? Well, I decided to call Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren. Hello. Hi, Congresswoman. It's Peter Baker from The New York Times. How are you?

I'm okay. I'm a little weird. She's a Democrat and represents the San Jose area in Northern California, basically Silicon Valley. We're just going to have a conversation, you and me, about the I-word, to use a phrase. You mean indictment or integrity? There you go, right. Integrity, yeah, it's a good word. Iran. And I want to talk to her because the Democrats do seem to be all over the place

and she's one of the key members on the House Judiciary Committee, the number two ranking Democrat on there. So the decision about whether to impeach the president is one she will very much influence. She will very much influence it. She's one of the most veteran and strongest voices on that committee. And she brings to bear a history

that very few other people in this Congress have, which is that she has been there basically through all of these impeachment debates of the last four decades. She was in Congress as a staffer back in 1974 when President Nixon faced impeachment. She was a member of the Judiciary Committee in 1998 when President Bill Clinton was impeached. And she, of course, today is a senior member of the Judiciary Committee as it considers what to do about President Trump. So Thinking about these three events in your life, each of them separated by, you know,

quite a number of years, how do you compare them? How do you look at them? Are there similarities? Are they very different? How do we make sense of this? Well, they're not equivalent situations, of course. I do think to use the Clinton impeachment proceedings

as any kind of model for good behavior is a mistake, and so I don't. I've learned lessons from how divisive it can be, but it was not a model of how to proceed. The Nixon impeachment was more of an orderly affair. They examined evidence. The committee started out, I don't think any of the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee thought it was a good idea to proceed. But by the time they had gone through all the evidence, a number of the Republican members and not just the Republicans, I mean, some of the conservative Democrats, so-called Dixiecrats, were not on board. But in the end, the process was such that they had to confront facts that led them to a conclusion. So, Peter, explain what she means when she says that the Clinton impeachment was not a good model. And why, by comparison, does she think that the Nixon impeachment was? Well, for one thing, the Clinton impeachment was triggered by a report by Ken Starr of the Independent Council. And Congress took his report when it received it without even looking at it, voting to release it wholesale to the public, unedited, unredacted.

And it was actually a decision made by both parties, both the Democrats and the Republican leadership decided they would do that because they were afraid of looking at it before releasing it to the public. And then a cascade of leaks, selective and self-serving leaks coming out from the other side. So, Zoloft can oppose her party leadership on that. On releasing it like that. On releasing it, unlooked at, unedited, unexamined. Even Ken Starr didn't think that Congress is going to simply put it out there without having looked at it first, because there was a lot of salacious material that made everybody look bad and certainly made the country look very uncomfortably at what was happening here. Because, of course, underlying the question of perjury and obstruction of justice was a question of a sexual affair. Right. And she also didn't like the fact that, in her view, the

Republicans were warping what the founders meant by high crimes and misdemeanors. From her perspective, the Nixon case was an example where a president has not only abused his power, but done so to the detriment of the health of the republic, you know. And that in her view, Clinton's crimes, whatever they might have been, perjury and obstruction of justice in a sexual harassment lawsuit, didn't upset the very nature of republican government in America. And she thought the republican party was going after him for partisan reasons, and she didn't like that. She also didn't like, I think, that so much of their fact-finding was simply dependent on Starr's investigation rather than doing a thorough investigation of their own, the way she remembers the Watergate era process.

And, you know, I think it was just, in her view, a very different kind of impeachment. So, in her mind, what Nixon did, his offenses, they actually had bearing on the Constitution, whereas Clinton's conduct, what he did wrong, didn't. Yeah, look, high crime misdemeanor does not mean any and all crimes, right? She can agree and a congressperson can agree that President Clinton violated the law by not telling the truth under oath and perhaps obstructing the case that he was defended in. But in her view, that didn't necessarily rise to the level of endangering, you know, the health of democracy in effect. And that's the distinction she made between Nixon and Clinton.

Do you favor an impeachment inquiry with regard to President Trump? Not at this moment. I mean, go back to 74 and the Judiciary Committee. They were operating. They had the impeachment referred to them. But before that had happened, the Senate had played looking at these things, wanted all of the information sent. So they had a lot of information available to them, and based on that information, started to proceed in a more formal way. Today, we haven't really seen any witnesses to speak of. The Justice Department said that we would have access to information that formed the basis of Mr. Mueller's report. However, they only work, they work nine to five. What planet do they live on? I mean, I was going to go over there at 5.30 and read from 5.30 to midnight or something. It's like, oh no, we close our doors at five. So we're now in a battle with them to actually gain

access in a way that makes sense. We will have other fact witnesses. We're going to get the information, the underlying information from the Mueller report, and then we'll see where we are. So what Congresswoman Zolofkin is saying is that she wants to see all the evidence underlying the Mueller report, basically everything that the special counsel collected to draw the conclusions that he drew or didn't draw. Right, exactly. Well, I wonder, what does she make of the conclusions that Mueller came to in his report and the information that is already public? Yeah, I asked her about that, in fact. Honestly, so much attention has been paid to volume two of the report. And I think actually Volume 1 is a very significant concern.

Volume 1 was the part about whether or not the president's campaign had some sort of an illegal cooperation or conspiracy with Russia to influence the election. Volume 2 was whether the president or his people tried to obstruct the Mueller inquiry as it developed. Right. I don't second-guess Mueller's determination not to charge the president with criminal conspiracy. He's the Right. I don't second guess Mueller's determination not to

charge the president with criminal conspiracy. He's the prosecutor. I'm not. Mueller's task was to examine facts to determine whether a crime has been committed. That's not the same task that the Congress has. A high crime and misdemeanor does not require conviction of a crime. It requires activity that basically shakes the foundation of the republic. What concerns you most? What is the thing that bothers you the most about what the president's been accused of in terms of that standard? You said you want to look more at the volume one. Does that mean that interactions with the Russians, even short of a criminal conspiracy, would be disturbing enough to say we don't think that you should continue in office? Well, I don't want to leap ahead at that. I do think one of the founding principles of the founders was that the president should be independent of foreign influence. The president of the United States should be completely and without any question totally for the American people. And so I think some of the, and I don't want to be conclusionary because we need to look at the evidence. Volume one is disturbing when you take a look at that standard that was in the minds of our founding fathers. founding fathers. What he did, in my judgment, if the facts fully support the report, was serious misconduct to try and cover up various elements of his campaign and contacts that both his campaign

and his administration had with Russians and other foreign entities, which leads me to think I need to know more about those connections between the Russians and other foreign entities and his campaign and his family and him and his staff, because the cover-up needs to be for a reason. Why? Why was this? So she clearly thinks that there's a lot of smoke there. She thinks that there's information in the Mueller report that suggests significant wrongdoing. And yet, very clearly, she's telling you, Peter, that she is not in support of opening impeachment proceedings against President Trump. And I'm not sure I fully understand how those two things coexist. Is your objection mainly about process?

Yeah, I was curious about that as well. Why is she so reluctant at this point to call for an official impeachment inquiry? I do think that we need to examine the evidence directly with our colleagues on the Judiciary Committee on both sides of the aisle. I mean, there's some of the Republicans, I think, that no matter what was said, I find it difficult to imagine that they would accept what they saw. But I don't think that's true of all of the Republicans on the committee or in the House. And so the process of examining the evidence is not just check the box, it's an important thing. It's an important element of gaining consensus to move forward.

Well, that's a good question. We specifically talked about Republicans back in the Nixon impeachment, like Caldwell Butler of Virginia and Bill Cohen of Maine and Larry Hogan of Maryland, who did eventually break away from President Nixon to decide that he had committed

high crimes and misdemeanors. Are there Republicans like a Caldwell Butler or a Larry Hogan or Bill Cohen, as there were in 1974, who ultimately did decide that the president from their party had committed wrongdoings? We'll see. But it's kind of interesting. Mr. Klein, as a freshman from Virginia, actually holds the seat, roughly the same seat, as Caldwell Butler. actually holds the seat, roughly the same seat, as Caldwell Butler. Would I have guessed at the beginning that Caldwell Butler was a yes vote on Articles 1 and 2? No. But as he listened to the evidence, he reached a conclusion that in good conscience he had to do that. So I think you have to give an opportunity for people to examine the evidence. Do you think, though, that the political environment has changed so much that the

relevance of 1974 has diminished as a precedent? I guess I wonder whether or not in today's environment, the parties are just so polarized, so locked into their two camps, whether there are open minds on either side that are interested in, you know, an open evaluation of evidence rather than sort of sticking to their side of a perpetual partisan battle? Well, I, you know, we'll find out. I believe that the vast majority of members of Congress, when they hold up their hand and swear to uphold and defend the Constitution, mean it. Now, they might have different ideas about what that means, but I think if you proceed in an orderly way, on a fact-based way,

you have to open your mind to the possibility that people who you may disagree with on issues like gay rights or choice would have the capacity to look at evidence and reach a conclusion. Does it matter whether we call it an impeachment inquiry? Isn't this an impeachment inquiry by any other name, whether we use the tile or not? Because if we're having witnesses and we're examining evidence and we're exploring this question, isn't that the same thing? It probably doesn't make a difference, in which case there's no need to do it.

It doesn't assist us in doing anything but creating additional division and conflict in the country. And so there's no need to use the I-word until we're ready to proceed. We'll be right back. Peter, Congresswoman Lofgren mentioned that she was worried about impeachment causing even more division and even more conflict in the country. And I wonder how she's thinking about the politics of all this. What are you hearing in your district when you're home? What do people talk about? Yeah, I asked her exactly that. Opinions about it?

Oh, sure. You know, I think Donald Trump got about 20% of the vote in my district. So, you know, those 20% probably still like him, but most people here in my district do not. I've had people, clerks in the supermarket say, can you get rid of him? And you say, well, you know, having an impeachment vote doesn't get rid of him. That's news to some people. But in your district, a district that obviously does lean so blue, is there a risk of swimming against the tide of all these people

who don't like the president and would like him removed from office if there were a possibility of doing it? Well, there's two ways to remove the president from office. I mean, one is to have a majority vote to impeach and a two-thirds vote to convict. The other is in a year and a half, there's an election. And the question is, which comes first? How much should public opinion matter in this?

The polls show right now that across the country, anyway, there's not a majority support for impeaching President Trump. Should that matter? Is that something that should the Congress, how much should the Congress take that into account when thinking about overturning, in effect, the results of a Democratic election? Well, the standard is in the Constitution. So public opinion doesn't alter the Constitution. It's treason, bribery, or high crime and misdemeanor. That's the standard. I do think that when the Nixon matter was begun, there was no sentiment whatsoever that Nixon should be removed from office. And in fact, as we know, he resigned before

even there was a vote in the House. But as the evidence accumulated, it had the effect of not only informing the members of Congress, it also had the effect of informing the American public. So really, they moved together. One of the arguments, we talk about the Clinton case, one of the arguments made back then that you made, and I think you've made today, is it was partisan, that it was seen, at least by the public, as a politically motivated effort to get rid of a president that they didn't like. A witch hunt, to use a phrase that was used then and is now used by today's president. Is there a risk for Democrats of looking like you're doing the same thing, in effect, to a president of the other party if it remains a Democrat-only conversation?

Well, I think there is. And again, that gets back to an examination of the facts. And I like to think that facts would drive action here. In the Clinton matter, we had 18 boxes of stuff brought over to the Ford building where we went over and looked at it. We had various evidence before us. and I don't think there was any question in my mind that the president was not truthful under oath about sex out of his, and his,

that was tawdry. But did it shake the foundations of the republic? I don't think so. And neither did the American public and I think probably neither did the Republicans. They blinded themselves to, they hated him. Okay, I don't like Trump, but I can't let my dislike of Trump

be the guiding light of what I do under my obligation under the Constitution. And the fact that I disagree with almost everything that Donald Trump has done is not the same as his activity shaking the foundation of the American government. And I think, you know, to the extent that Republicans understand this is a legitimate inquiry, not some partisan, you know, gotcha effort, the country will be able to move forward in an orderly way. Now, there's another question whether there's time to do that. And I don't know the answer to that.

Some of that will depend on how quickly we gain access to the evidence and how quickly we can proceed through the evidence and what conclusions we reach. Right. In fact, both Nixon and Clinton were in their second terms. In fact, I wonder whether if we get into fall before we even really get to a head on this, whether it is too late and the election campaign cycle will be going in full throttle pretty much from now on. And does it become more difficult to conduct an impeachment if it were to come to that against that backdrop? Well, it doesn't help it, that's for sure. But I do think, you know, we need to just plod through our committee process and do

our job, and then we'll see where we are. Well, Congresswoman, thank you. Really appreciate it. It's great. Thank you. Right. Thank you. So, Peter, the congresswoman is arguing that if Republicans and Democrats can examine the evidence in a bipartisan, orderly way, like they did in 74 and not like they did in 98, that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, the rest of Congress, and the public for that matter, will come to a consensus about impeachment. And I wonder what you make of that. Well, that's a thesis she's testing. I think that what that overlooks is just how different

the political environment is today than it was in 1974, how different the parties are today, how different the polarization is today. And it feels very, very hard to imagine large numbers of Republicans changing their mind absent something dramatically different than what they already know. But, you know, on the other hand, it does have the effect, whether it's intentional or not, of pushing this down the road a little bit. And the later and later we get into the year, the more and more there'll be a sense, I think, in Washington of, well, we're in the middle of the election campaign. We're about to have voting in Iowa and New Hampshire. Let's just let the political process take care of this and the voters can make their own judgment at the ballot box.

Well, do you think that that is the intention? Because otherwise what she's articulating sounds a little bit naive or just kind of oddly rosily optimistic about how Congress works. And she has been in Congress for 20-some years. Yeah, my guess is that she's pretty realistic about the chances that this actually happens, but that this is the best way to go forward is to follow a process and therefore to defend yourselves by saying, well, you know, we're doing it the right way, whether it leads to the outcome that you, the base, would want to have or not. The other alternative is you say, basically for political reasons, we're not going to

do it. And that then raises questions of if you don't do it now, when would you do it? Have you changed the bar for future presidents? Are you saying that this kind of conduct, if you think he is guilty of it, is okay by a president? And I think that rather than say that kind of thing, you know, for her view and other Democrats like her, it's better to say, let's just follow the process and see where it leads. Hmm. So she's looking for a way to seem like the Democrats are investigating the president. Correct me if any of this seems too cynical. But in fact, she's knowingly delaying this process,

but with a kind of political cover and saying, we need to make sure we're doing this honorably and orderly. Well, political cover is, as you say, is kind of a cynical way to put it. I think that they're in between a hard place and a rock, right? That they don't have a mandate in their view at this point to impeach him, politically at least, and yet they don't want to let him off the hook for things that they think he did wrong. And what's the best way to navigate that particular conundrum that they're under, which is to say, do you simply wash your

hands of it and say, well, we don't have the votes, therefore, let's pretend it didn't happen? Or, you know, to at least see if the process will change those dynamics, however unrealistic it might seem. Right. I mean, she said that there are two ways to remove a president, impeachment and an election. And the question is, which comes first? Right. And the election is upon us now, basically, or the campaign is. Anyway, this is the week we're going to see the very first Democratic candidate debates. And the political process will only get more all-consuming from here on in. So any impeachment in the context of that suddenly is done in the middle of an election. And it

becomes easier and easier the longer we go into the year to say, let's just leave it for the voters. We're almost at a point where they're going to go to the ballot boxes anyway. Let's leave it to them to decide. Peter, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Okay, thank you very much.

In a few moments, I'll be signing an executive order imposing hard-hitting sanctions on the Supreme Leader of Iran. On Monday, President Trump followed through with his threat to impose new economic sanctions on Iran. Today's action follows a series of aggressive behaviors by the Iranian regime in recent weeks, including shooting down of U.S. drones. The sanctions target the country's supreme leader and eight of his military commanders,

including the head of the unit that the U.S. says shot down an American drone last week. The assets of Ayatollah Khomeini and his office will not be spared from the sanctions. The sanctions will bar each of them from using the international banking system or accessing any assets that they hold overseas. So I'll sign this now, and I appreciate you all being here. Thank you. And the Supreme Court has struck down a federal ban on registering immoral or scandalous trademarks, saying it violates the First Amendment.

The case revolved around a Los Angeles businessman whose line of clothing sold under the name F-U-C-T was rejected by the federal trademark office as offensive. was rejected by the Federal Trademark Office as offensive. Six justices, including members of the court's liberal and conservative wings, voted in favor of the businessman. At a time when free speech is under attack, wrote Justice Samuel Alito, it is especially important for this court to remain firm on the principle that the First Amendment does not tolerate viewpoint discrimination. We affirm that principle today. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Babar. See you tomorrow.