The Daily - The President, Joe Biden and Ukraine

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

Over the weekend, reports of a secret whistle-blower complaint against President Trump turned into allegations that the president had courted foreign interference from Ukraine to hurt a leading Democratic rival, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Trump called the allegations a “witch hunt” and accused Mr. Biden of corruption.Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, who covers national security and federal investigations for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: President Trump acknowledged that he discussed Mr. Biden during a phone call with Ukraine’s president, but he did not directly confirm news reports that he had pressured the foreign leader for an investigation.Here’s what we know about the role of Mr. Biden and his son Hunter in the controversy.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Over the weekend, reports of an unknown whistleblower with unnamed complaints against the president turned into allegations that President Trump courted foreign interference from Ukraine to hurt his leading Democratic rival, Joe Biden.

The president is calling it a witch hunt and saying it's Biden who is engaged in corruption. Mike Schmidt on whether Ukraine is shaping up to be the Russia of 2020. It's Monday, September 23rd. Mike, take me back to when you first learned about this whistleblower complaint. So, earlier this month, we started to hear that there was a whistleblower that had some type of information and that Capitol Hill was struggling to get their hands on it. And then last Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that that complaint came from someone in the intelligence community

and it involved contact between the president and a foreign leader. So what'd you do? because all of a sudden, hold on, there's someone in the intelligence community that thinks that the president has done something so egregious that they are trying to get the word about this out somehow. What is it that the president could have done? What does it involve? What did he do that was so extreme that what appears to be a regular

civil servant went so far as to file a whistleblower complaint, which is very significant, on the person who leads the executive branch? So what do you find about this complaint? Well, what we learn about this complaint is that it had been made to someone known as the Intelligence Community Inspector General, the ICIG in Washington lingo. He is the watchdog for the intelligence community. And we learn that he has looked at this allegation and found it credible. But despite that, he's been unable to pass that information along to Congress,

who he reports to on how he is policing and keeping a watch over the intelligence community. And why is he having trouble getting this whistleblower complaint to Congress? The system is set up for whistleblowers to come forward about government wrongdoing and for that information to go to an inspector general and for it to be reported to Congress. But what happens if it involves the president of the United States? And what happens if it involves potentially privileged conversations the president of the United States was having. What had happened is that the ICIG

had been unsure how to deal with this, had looked at this and said, uh-oh, what do I do? And had consulted with the Justice Department. And the Justice Department had said, no, you cannot give this to Congress. Technically, the ICIG actually is part of the executive branch and by extension works for the president. And the Trump administration is saying, hey, executive branch employee, you can't do anything with that. You work for us and we're telling you no. So at this point, we know that the complaint involves the president, a conversation he had with a foreign leader, and something that bothered the intelligence community. And those three things are a potentially huge deal for any president. So we dig in as hard as we can to try and find out any little bit more we can

about what is in this complaint and what it relates directly to. And in the process of that, we learn something interesting. Which is what? It involves Ukraine. what? It involves Ukraine. And what is it about Ukraine that starts to signal what this conversation might have been about? So there are two pretty interesting data points. The first is that for several months, the United States, through Trump, has been withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in aid that the Ukrainians say that they need to protect their own sovereignty and protect themselves from the Russians. And that brings us to the second data point about Ukraine. And that's that in the past several months, as the president and his surrogates have moved their attention towards attacking Joe Biden, we happen to have the man in the middle tonight. The president's supporters,

specifically his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Good to have you on the show. I'm glad I'm on tonight because what you just said is totally erroneous. Have been pushing the notion that when Biden got the prosecutor fired, the new prosecutor who Biden approved, you don't get to approve a prosecutor in a foreign country unless something fishy is going on. The presidential candidate, Joe Biden, has corrupt ties to the Ukraine and needs to be investigated because of that. The new prosecutor dropped the case not just on Biden's kid and the crooked company that Biden's kid worked for, Burisma. That was done as a matter of record in October of that has been accused of wrongdoing. And Giuliani has essentially been saying that when Biden was vice president, he pushed to have a prosecutor

in Ukraine fired in order to prevent the prosecutor from looking into allegations related to his son's business dealings there. And you won't cover it. And you want to cover some ridiculous charge that I urged the Ukrainian government to investigate corruption. Well, I did, and I'm proud of it. And it's not a ridiculous allegation. You just admitted it. You just admitted it. And that, of course, would be in the service of embarrassing and hurting Joe Biden's presidential candidacy. They don't make any bones about it. They're out to defeat him in 2020 and are fairly open about the fact that they are trying to hurt his candidacy. They see him as potentially the biggest threat

to a Trump reelection. And like, is there any legitimacy, as best we can tell, to what Giuliani is saying about Biden's son and what action Biden took? From what we can see, there's no evidence to back up these claims by Giuliani. And in fact, it wasn't Joe Biden's decision to have this prosecutor removed. Many world leaders and organizations were calling for this prosecutor to be ousted. Okay, so given those data points of the things we already knew about Ukraine, how does it connect back to this whistleblower complaint? Well, we're starting to wonder whether the fact that the Ukrainians wanted this money, that Trump was holding back on it, and that Trump wanted the Ukrainians to investigate this was at the heart

of what the complaint was about. And then we learned that on July 25th, Trump had a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. On eight different occasions on that call, On eight different occasions on that call, Trump told Zelensky that he should investigate these allegations and share the findings with Giuliani. And do we know if the money that Ukraine wanted from the Trump administration, whether that came up during the call? We don't know whether it came up, but we do know that earlier this month, the Trump administration

released that money to the Ukrainians. Mike, I just want to piece this together. You have laid out a scenario in which President Trump calls the president of Ukraine and presses him to investigate his political opponent's son. And all the while, it would very much be in the air that he controls $250 million that that president of Ukraine wants, while he is proposing that that president of Ukraine basically do him a political favor. Correct. We'll be right back.

Okay, so that's more or less where the story stands on Sunday. Yes. And then Trump comes out and addresses the media about the allegation. We had a great conversation. The conversation I had was largely congratulatory. He says that he had a conversation with the president of Ukraine. The fact that we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine and Ukraine. Brought up Joe Biden. But what he said is that he wouldn't give, I think it was billions of dollars to Ukraine unless they fired the prosecutor who was looking at his son and his son's company, the company that his son worked with. And that's a very dishonest thing.

And believes that there is real wrongdoing that is not being examined. So the president acknowledges having a conversation with the president of Ukraine in which he complains about Biden, complains about Biden's son, accuses the two of them of corruption. I have to say, for those who believe the president pressured Zelensky to investigate his rival, it certainly feels like Trump is giving them a fair bit to work with. Correct.

The president appears to have given his political opponents a fresh avenue to go down as they try and investigate him. Trump often wants to get institutions, whether it's the FBI or Justice Department, or in this case, a foreign country, to investigate his rivals and for his rivals to be tarnished by that investigation. And to me, it fit a pattern that we had seen with him. And here he is doing it again, but at the same time giving the Democrats a entirely new issue to push in late July. So that's right after the Mueller report comes out, which is a years-long investigation into meddling in an American

election by a foreign government. And yet, here we are. The call occurs the day after Mueller testifies. At that point, it's pretty clear that the president is going to pay no real political consequences for the contacts that his campaign had with Russia during the election, including meeting with the Russians about dirt that the Russians claim to have on Hillary Clinton. So why, if the president in his own mind thinks he survives the Mueller investigation, why wouldn't he continue that behavior if he hasn't had to face a consequence for it? So where do things stand now? We are just getting a statement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on this most recent news with regards to the whistleblower report.

So Democrats see this as the gravest abuse of power that Trump has done since coming to office. Here's what she says. done since coming to office. Here's what she says. If the president has done what has been alleged, then he is stepping into a dangerous minefield with serious repercussions for his administration and our democracy. They believe there's a freshness to this and they can use this as a new way of investigating the president and hopefully getting that to resonate with the public in ways that Russia did not. And Mike, why would this be the gravest? In the case of Russia, Russia appears to have been the one reaching out to the Trump campaign to help them. In this case, the sitting president of the United States may have been using his diplomatic power to pressure a foreign country to do work for him that would benefit his campaign. It's a proactive use of power that we have not seen before. The other thing is that when the 2016

contacts between Russians and Trump associates happened, Trump was not president. He had no presidential powers to push the Russians on different things. In this instance, he is the president. And he's sort of mixing together diplomacy and political operations that would benefit himself. Like, in the end, how important is it to what happens next in this case? Whether or not this conversation that President Trump is now acknowledging happened,

encouraging Ukraine to investigate Biden's son, that it ever involved a discussion about money, that it was a quid pro quo? Well, on one hand, it would be hugely important because it would show the quid pro quo and what would be given in exchange for the help. There would be a, hey, you do this, I'll give you this. But on the other hand, why does it matter? If you're the president of the United States and you're asking a far smaller country that's dependent on you to do something, isn't money essentially already on the line? Isn't it sort of implicit that if you're speaking to the president of the United States and he's asking you to do something that you could face

a financial consequence or benefit because of that. I wonder if this is starting to feel like the 2020 version of 2016, where Republicans will say that what should really be investigated is Biden and Democrats will say, no, no, no. What should be investigated is Trump's conduct. Yeah. In 2016, it was all about Trump saying that Hillary Clinton was corrupt and the Democrats saying, but look at you. And here we are again. But in Clinton's place, we have Biden. And we have the Republicans saying, why isn't anyone looking into Biden's corruption? And it's this sort of split screen redux of what we saw.

split-screen redux of what we saw. And in the coming months, you can see the political arguments breaking down in the same fashion that they did in 2016. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Here's what I know.

I know Trump deserves to be investigated. He is violating every basic norm of a president. Over the weekend, during a campaign event in Iowa, Joe Biden addressed Trump's phone call with the president of Ukraine, calling it

an abuse of power. Why is he on the phone with a foreign leader trying to intimidate a foreign leader if that's what happened? That appears what happened. Trump's doing this because he knows I'll beat him like a drum. And he's using the abuse of power

and every element of the presidency to try to do something to smear me. Asked about the allegations of wrongdoing made by Giuliani and Trump, Biden said there was no truth to them. Everybody looked at this and everybody's looked at it and said there's nothing there. The fate of the whistleblower's complaint remains uncertain. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff has subpoenaed it

from the Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, who refused to comply. Maguire is scheduled to publicly testify about the case before Schiff's committee on Thursday. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.