The Daily - The Post-Acquittal Presidency

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

Since his acquittal in the Senate, President Trump has undertaken a campaign of retribution against those who crossed him during the impeachment inquiry — while extending favors to those who have tried to protect him. Today, we explore what has happened so far in this new phase of his presidency. Guest: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: Mr. Trump called those who testified against him in the impeachment “evil,” “corrupt” and “crooked.” After he was acquitted, he began firing witnesses.A handful of senators reached out to the White House to warn the president not to dismiss Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union who testified in the House hearings. Mr. Trump removed him anyway.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, President Trump has undertaken a campaign of retribution against those who crossed him during the impeachment inquiry and favors for those who have tried to protect him. Peter Baker on the post-acquittal presidency. and favors for those who have tried to protect him. Peter Baker on the post-acquittal presidency. It's Friday, February 14th.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. Peter, I want to begin with retribution. How does that start? Well, thank you very much, everybody. Wow. The day after his acquittal in the Senate, the President gathers people in the East Room of the White House for an event. It's not quite a press conference. It's not quite a speech.

But it's really kind of a mix, a mix of a celebration of his acquittal, but a venting session of his grievances. I want to start by thanking some of, and I call them friends, because, you know, you develop friendships and relationships when you're in battle and war. And he wants to thank the people who stood behind him, names them in the audience. Mitch McConnell, I want to tell you, you did a fantastic job. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader who did more than anybody to secure his acquittal in the trial. And he mentions Jim Jordan. When I first got to know Jim, I said, huh, he never wears a jacket. What the hell's going on?

He's obviously very proud of his body. And other members of the House, the Freedom Caucus, the conservative Republicans who always stood by him in the most aggressive and assertive and staunch way. And then, of course, he turns to his enemies. The people he blames for his ordeal, people he thinks have treated him so unfairly, have plotted against him, been disloyal or what have you. And he names ones that you would expect, of course. Nancy Pelosi is a horrible person. Nancy Pelosi says she's a horrible person. A corrupt politician named Adam Schiff made up my statement to the Ukrainian president.

He brought it out of thin air, just made it up. They say he's a screenwriter, a failed screenwriter. He names, of course, Adam Schiff, the lead House prosecutor. And then you have some that used religion as a crutch. They never used it before. He names Mitt Romney, the Republican, the only Republican senator to vote for conviction. But, you know, it's a failed presidential candidate,

so things can happen when you fail so badly running for president. These two now, of course, are really at odds, and you see the visceral anger in the president in this moment. at Oz, and you see the visceral anger in the president in this moment. And he mentions Colonel Alexander Vindman, a member of his own staff, a detailee from the Pentagon working on Ukraine issues, and his twin brother, Yevgeny Vindman, who also works at the NSC staff. He says it almost in passing. Lieutenant Colonel Vindman and his twin brother, right?

And he says it with such dripping disdain in his voice. You get the sense immediately, of course, that this is somebody who's really angered the president and he's got his attention. And remind us what puts Vindman in this list of enemies. Colonel Vindman was one of the members of the White House staff, the National Security Council staff, who were subpoenaed by the House to testify in the impeachment inquiry. He didn't come forward voluntarily. He was required to, by law, to give his testimony to the committee. And during his testimony, he told about being on the famous July 25th call between the president and President Zelensky of Ukraine when the president asked him to investigate Joe Biden and the Democrats. And Colonel Vindman told the committee that he thought that was inappropriate, and he reported it to his superiors at the NSC. And for that, he has been on the target list of

President Trump and his allies ever since, painted as disloyal, painted as even treasonous to the country. His patriotism questioned, even though he's a decorated veteran of the Iraq War, injured in battle, and really a kind of a symbol to both sides of the sort of where this fight has evolved. Our country is just respected again, and it's an honor to be with the people in this room. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you very much.

And so he comes to the end of this sort of rambling, meandering talk that goes on for an hour and two minutes. And you get the sense that this is not the end and that there's more to come. President Trump has begun his revenge in the wake of his impeachment trial. he had just talked about so dismissively at the East Room event, finds himself escorted out of the White House by security guards and told his services are no longer needed. Exiled back to the Pentagon from which he came. Not just him. Escorted out of his job and off the White House grounds, as was his twin brother, who was also assigned to the NSC. His brother, Yevgeny Vindman, who didn't do anything, had nothing to do with the impeachment hearings at all, except to show up and sit behind his brother

just as a member of family support, also dismissed from his post at the National Security Council, marched out at the same time by security, and sent back to the Pentagon. Today, Vindman's lawyer issued a statement saying, quote, the truth has cost him his job, his career, and his privacy. You can understand why a president might not want somebody on his staff who had testified

in an impeachment hearing against him. But it was handled in a way that was meant to maximize the public message, right? I'll tell you what I mean by that. The NSC is currently undergoing a downsizing. And in fact, the plan was to move Colonel Vindman out as part of that, or at least to use that as the cover to say, it's not about reprisal. It's not about his role in impeachment. It's just part of this overall restructuring. And that's frankly how other presidents might have handled a situation like that. Come up with a rationale.

Come up with a rationale. Come up with a public face-saving kind of storyline, a narrative at least, that even though people would see through it, would at least have the veneer of looking professional rather than vindictive. That was not what the president wanted. He made sure they did this separate from that reorganization. They did not explain it as part of that reorganization. And they did not deny when we called them that day that this was what it looked like, which was, of course, an act of retribution. Okay, so what happens next? Well, we thought that was the story for the day these two brothers being marched out of there.

Right. And then we discover as the evening arrives that it's not over. Now we're getting word that the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, he is out as well. Gordon Sondland, you may remember him. He was the ambassador to the European Union who had been deeply involved in the Ukraine pressure campaign

on the phone with the president and required to testify, became a key witness in the House hearings. He said that they were operating on the orders of the president himself. He said that it was clearly a quid pro quo. And he said that everyone was in the loop. Suddenly it turns out he's out as well. Now, as with Vindman, there was a way to do this that would have minimized the public kerfuffle. Gordon Sondland actually was ready to leave. He

had told his superiors at the State Department that he was ready to step down on his own, and he got word that Friday, you have to resign today, they told him. But he says, no, I don't want to resign on the same day that you're pushing out these Venmans as if I'm part of some sort of purge. If you want me out today, you're going to have to fire me. And they called back and said, okay, you're fired. So at this point, it's clear that this is a vindictive purge of anyone who did anything that put the president in a negative light during the impeachment process. And what is the reaction to that, that very clear and deliberate message from the president inside Washington? Certainly among Democrats, even among a few Republicans

who say, what's the message you're sending? If you respond to a subpoena as ordered by the law and you give your testimony, you shouldn't be punished for doing that. You know, the president's view is, why should I have people I can't trust working for me? It's my right as the president to have a staff that serves my interests, that I believe is loyal. And he's made clear that loyalty is A number one when it comes to this president.

There's no other quality that matters more to him. And Peter, as somebody who's covered many White Houses, is he right about that? I mean, is it ultimately a presidential prerogative to decide if someone testified against you that, you know, you no longer want them around? You don't want them in those jobs anymore, especially presidential appointments. It's a good question, right? Because it does feel like it would be untenable to have testified and provided damaging testimony against the president and then come to work every day afterwards. You would think, in fact, you might not want to necessarily do that.

But the question isn't what's the right place then for that person to work. The question is what the message the president is trying to send by what he's doing, right? Right. This president has made a point of making sure everybody knows these people are out and they're out because of him and because he will not tolerate disloyalty. Okay, so that is the campaign of retribution so far, post-acquittal. Which brings us to the campaign of protection for the president's allies. Right. It's not enough just to go after his perceived enemies. Now it's time to do something to protect his friends.

And for him, this is going to start with a colorful character and longtime friend and advisor named Roger Stone, who's about to go to prison. We'll be right back. So, Peter, before we get to how the president is trying to protect Roger Stone, remind us who Roger Stone is. Roger Stone has been in American politics going back decades. He is somebody who calls himself a dirty trickster.

— I'm certainly guilty of bluffing and posturing and punking the Democrats. Unless they pass some law against bulls**t and I missed it. I'm engaging in tradecraft. It's politics. He's a self-proclaimed fan of Richard Nixon. Even to this day, he has a Richard Nixon tattoo. Right. He's somebody who was involved early on in some of the, you know, Reagan and Dole campaigns, but over the years kind of drifted off into the side.

He's really kind of more of a fringe character, a conspiracy theorist, a provocateur. In 1980, Stone began a lobbying firm with Paul Manafort that unapologetically catered to human rights abusers. He has these maxims on how he conducts his political strategy. One of his rules is never turn down an opportunity to have sex or be on television. We've seen a lot of colorful characters in the world of political consulting. None more colorful than Roger Stone, and that is the most charitable adjective you can apply to the single weirdest man

possibly in the history of political consulting. He had been friends for years with Donald Trump, and like Roger Stone, Trump comes from the outside, right? He was not part of the Republican establishment, but suddenly he's powering forward toward a presidential bid. And he brings with him people like Roger Stone, who had not been in the center

of American politics now for years. Right, and my recollection is that it's during that campaign that Roger Stone gets into very significant trouble. Right, he becomes wrapped up in the whole story about the Russian hacking of the Democratic emails. Hillary Clinton's campaign dealing with more email problems. The email account of campaign chair John Podesta was hacked and many of the emails released. Things he said gave the impression that he might have known about it in advance. So were you surprised when John Podesta's emails came out, as you seem

to predict, ahead of time? I was interested like the rest of the country. Were you surprised? No, I wouldn't say that I was surprised. And that puts him right in the heart of this. Is he a link between the Trump campaign and Russia through perhaps WikiLeaks, which is the cutout that the Russians use to get these emails out. And so once the president wins and comes into office, his friend Roger Stone finds himself under investigation for what he knew and when he knew it. And then Congress jumps in. They call Stone to testify at the House Intelligence Committee. And this is where he really gets into trouble. We had a very frank exchange. I answered all of the questions.

I made the case that the accusation that I knew about John Podesta's email hack in advance was false, that I knew about the content and source of the WikiLeaks disclosures regarding Hillary Clinton was false. He starts telling things that are demonstrably not true, and he ultimately ends up getting charged with lying to Congress. He also tries to get an associate of his to not tell the truth, threatens him even, threatens to kill his dog.

Whoa. And he was put on trial. And last fall, Roger Stone was convicted of seven crimes, seven felonies, including lying to Congress and witness intimidation. And these are convictions on very serious charges of obstructing a congressional investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. That's right. I remember thinking when that happened, like, whoa, this is the big leagues for Roger Stone.

Exactly. And the question is, why is he lying? Why is he obstructing? Is he trying to protect the president? This is how this all fits together, right? This goes back to the whole Russian interference. This goes back to the Mueller probe. This goes back to the things that have dominated this presidency for three years and frustrated this president for three years.

for three years. So he sees Roger Stone's conviction as an illegitimate shot at him, at himself, the president, a way of trying to take him down because they couldn't take him down any other way. Okay. So Peter, how does the president try to protect Stone after this conviction? So even as he's, you know, in the middle of this campaign of retribution against the Vindman brothers and Gordon Sondland, he is increasingly aware that the sentencing for Roger Stone is coming up. And then when Monday comes around and the prosecutors present their recommendation for a sentence to the court, the prosecutors ask for seven to nine years behind bars. That's the normal sentence that would be required under the sentencing guidelines passed by Congress for crimes of the type that Roger Stone was convicted of. So they didn't go outside of

those guidelines. They simply said, we want to sentence him to what the guidelines say. That doesn't mean the judge would go along with it, but that was their recommendation. Well, that set the president off. The president expressed his outrage on Twitter, calling it a very unfair situation, adding, cannot allow this miscarriage of justice. In the middle of the night, he starts sending out tweets, angry tweets, how can this happen? The nine years, it's outrageous, and they're going after him. How come they don't go after my enemies, but they go after him? And that just sort of, you know, sets the town ablaze.

Controversy in the nation's capital now over a sentencing recommendation for President Trump's longtime friend, Roger Stone. Here's a president weighing in directly on a court case involving a friend of his. This is something that we have not seen really since Watergate. Presidents don't, especially publicly, weigh in on prosecutions of people that they are personally connected to, at least except in the venue of issuing pardons at some point, which they sometimes do. So this just shocked a lot of people.

But what really shocked a lot of people in Washington was when they woke up a few hours later on Tuesday and they saw not only these tweets, but they saw that the Attorney General of the United States, Bill Barr, had essentially overruled the career prosecutors. Breaking news involving President Trump, a stunning reversal in the sentencing recommendation for Trump confidant Roger Stone.

And said, no, we're not going to ask for a sentence this heavy. We're going to ask for something lighter. So not seven to nine years, something less. Not seven to nine years, something less. Doesn't specify what, but something below what the guidelines would normally call for. And so this has caused a huge furor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington. What is going on? President Trump knows how to get away with stuff when we're not watching.

The four career prosecutors who worked on the Stone case, all four of them, quit. We're following some truly stunning breaking news still developing by the minute this hour. Federal prosecutors in the Roger Stone criminal case have resigned this afternoon. One after the other, one, two, three, four, just like that. This does not happen. Prosecutors don't resign just days before they go to sentencing after a case that they've worked so hard on. One of them actually quits his job altogether, leaves the Justice Department as a whole. In protest. Well, they don't say it, but that's the obvious conclusion.

Yes, they're protesting the overruling of their recommendation. And I think that they felt like they had, you know, an ethical obligation. If they had told the court, this is the sentence we think is appropriate, and then suddenly a day later, the same department is coming in and saying, no, we don't. How is that tenable for them to continue on that case? And Peter, given what has just happened, the firing of Vindman, Sondland, Vindman's brother, what is the reaction to this intervention? Not just the retribution, but this protection? Well, in effect, the Democrats are saying, we told you so, right? No serious person believes President Trump has learned any lesson.

He doesn't learn any lessons. He does just what he wants, what suits his ego at the moment. Senator Schumer, the Democratic leader in the upper chamber, goes to the floor and gives a pretty passionate speech in which he says that the natural consequence of acquitting the president on the Ukraine matter means that he feels completely unleashed and empowered to do whatever he thinks is right for his own political interests. We are witnessing a crisis in the rule of law in America,

unlike one we have ever seen before. It's a crisis of President Trump's making, but it was enabled and emboldened by every Senate Republican. Even among some Republicans, you're seeing, you know, some discomfort, particularly among moderate Republicans who tried to give the president the benefit of the doubt by standing with him in the impeachment trial. A couple of them had said even, well, maybe he'll have learned a lesson from all of this and he'll be more measured.

He'll be more restrained in the future and that that would be a good thing. Well, what you're hearing a lot of people saying is that doesn't seem to be the case. And I think that the question going forward is going to be, is it just a burst of energy and lashing out in the days after the acquittal or just the beginning of a month's long recalibration of his administration? What is he going to do going forward? Right. Is this the post-acquittal presidency, one in which enemies are punished and allies are at all costs protected? Right. Exactly. And that the instruments of government are to serve the president's interests, not just the public's interests. Peter, what you have described here is what in old school political terms might be called a

strategy of carrots and sticks, but on steroids, right? I mean, you protect those who have done right by you and you punish those who have somehow wronged you. And in the case of the president, that steroided up strategy clearly worked when it came to impeachment. We talked to you, we talked to many of our colleagues about the fact that there was genuine fear of crossing this president and that that influenced how the Senate voted in the impeachment trial. So if this strategy is working, and by all accounts, it is working, why shouldn't the president keep it up? Well, it's a great question. I think one

of the things we've learned about the last three years is that the norms, the standards, the lines that we used to think of that constrained a president were more aspirational and conceptual than they were legal. And you go, look, you go back far enough, you're going to find plenty of presidents who punished their enemies and protected their friends. But in the post-Watergate period in particular, when we put in new guardrails, we put in new laws, we put in new systems, we thought that that had been minimized at the very least, right? That, yeah, you're going to probably give an appointment to somebody who's been good

to you and you're going to maybe take away a grant from the state of somebody who crossed you on a vote. These things happen. They happen under any presidency. This is that as you put it on steroids. And it's overt. It's right out there in the open. He wants everybody to know what he's doing. He wants everybody to understand.

You are loyal to this president or you should get out. And that's true of people in government. That's true of people even in Congress. He's made very clear the Republican Party has no room for anybody who is not on his side. You're either in his camp or you're not. And of course, there's a larger context here, which is we're in the middle of a presidential election.

And I wonder how this behavior by the president fits into his reelection strategy. You say all this fits into a broader approach by this president to politics. It's not about unifying. It's about dividing. It's about us versus them. And this is what the appeal is to his constituents.

It is, I am fighting for you and they are trying to stop me. It's the deep state. It's the Democrats. It's the fake news media. They're all trying to stop me and by extension you. And that's why you should stick with me in this election this fall. So this idea that Washington is all

alarmed by retributions and protections of friends because it violates norms doesn't hurt his appeal to many of his voters out there because it's part of this larger argument that he's making. many of his voters out there because it's part of this larger argument that he's making. And the larger argument is, I am a force of disruption. I am a force that is shaking things up. And the reason why you're seeing things

in the news that are bad about me is because they're fighting back. And you should stay with me because it's not just me, it's about you too. Peter, thank you. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you. On Thursday, in an interview with ABC News,

Attorney General Bill Barr said that the president's interference in cases like Roger Stone's was making it all but impossible for him to run the Department of Justice. To have public statements and tweets made about the department, about our people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending in the department, and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we're doing our work with integrity.

But Barr did not directly criticize the president and confirmed in the interview that he had overruled prosecutors to recommend a more lenient sentence for Stone. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Are there any senators in the chamber wishing to change their vote? If not, the yeas are 55, the nays are 45. The joint resolution as amended is passed. On Thursday, a bipartisan majority in the Senate passed a resolution requiring President Trump to seek authorization from Congress before taking further military action against Iran.

move to restrain presidential power and reflected the growing unease within Congress over Trump's approach to Iran, which many fear could lead to all-out war. It follows Trump's decision six weeks ago to kill Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian military commander, without the authorization of Congress. Iranian military commander without the authorization of Congress. Thank you. Sindhu Yanasambandan, Jasmine Aguilera, MJ Davis-Lynn, Austin Mitchell, Sayer Kavado, Nina Patuk, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guimet, Hans Butow, and Robert Jimison. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnik, Michaela Bouchard, Stella Tan,

Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, and Nora Keller. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Tuesday after the holiday. Thank you.