The Daily - The Week Diplomats Broke Their Silence

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

Members of the American diplomatic corps testified about the state of U.S. foreign policy in private hearings on Capitol Hill this week. According to our national political correspondent, their testimonies revealed “a remarkably consistent story” about the ways in which career diplomats have been sidelined to make room for Trump administration officials. The conduct of those officials, and the nature of the directives they received, is at the center of the House impeachment investigation.We look back at a week inside the U.S. Capitol as that inquiry enters a pivotal phase. Guest: Nicholas Fandos, who covers Congress for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background coverage: Gordon D. Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, told impeachment investigators on Thursday that President Trump delegated Ukraine policy to his personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani.Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, threw Washington into turmoil on Thursday when he first confirmed, then retracted, that Mr. Trump had withheld military aid to pressure Ukraine.

There he is. Who's not warned about the wind? Good morning. Hi. Hi. Salmon is testifying as we speak. This is a big day. Hey, we're here to get press credentials.

We're from the New York Times. Hey, we're here to get press credentials. We're from the New York Times. Hey, we're here to get press credentials. We're from the New York Times. All right, we're in the house. So we're in a... Oh, watch out, people are coming.

The house speaker is walking by. There's an entourage. That was Nancy Pelosi. That was Nancy Pelosi. That was cool. Okay, so what are we doing? We're waiting for Nick to get off the phone. We also could say hi. I have a croissant I'd like to finish.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. A week inside the U.S. Capitol as the impeachment inquiry enters a pivotal phase. It's Friday, October 18th. There's a bunch of rooms. What's going on?

We're just trying to find a room that is quiet enough to make an episode of The Daily. I think this will work. Okay, here we go. Nick Fandos, you've been on the Hill all week. Walk me through this. What does the impeachment inquiry actually look like on the ground? Yeah, so, I mean, the crazy thing is that the House opened this impeachment inquiry a little more than three weeks ago now on their way out of town for a two-week recess. So members were scattered all over the country, meeting with constituents, holding town halls, while back here in the Capitol, a core group of staff members basically for the House Intelligence Committee and a couple of others stuck around and began issuing subpoenas and requests, setting up the very first witness depositions for their investigation. And so this week was the week that five of those depositions, one a day, were lined up and the lawmakers were going to be coming

back. So that's kind of what I was expecting when I arrived at the Capitol on Monday. Hello. Hey, it's Nick. Hi. And I met up with our colleagues from The Daily, Rachel Quester and Claire Tennesketter, who are going to spend the week with me. It's so nice outside. It's so nice outside. We had a meet-up outside of the Capitol because it was Columbus Day, actually. The press galleries and all the functional staff were not working here,

so I had to escort them in specially. We walked inside and down three sets of stairs. Where are we? We're standing now beside the doors to the House Intelligence Committee SCIF. And at the bottom of those stairs, we end up at the secured rooms, we call the SCIF of the House Intelligence Committee. SCIF? Secure? Compartmentalized Information Facility.

Which is one of the most secretive in Congress. It's where this investigation is taking place, all behind closed doors. And they have these red stickers on them, which get photographed all the time and are always in the newspaper, which is a restricted area. You can't go there. So the three of us and a bunch of reporters were gathered around outside, basically waiting for any emissaries to come out of the room and give some sense of what was going on back there

with the very first witness deposition. All day trying to, like, mentally pierce that barrier. So it says something about this week that this room is where Congress is holding these hearings. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's entirely outside of the public view. This is an investigation that could result in an attempt to remove President Trump. And the earliest stages of the investigation, at least, are all being conducted at a public view.

And this has been a source of some contention early on. First two interviews totaling approximately 20 hours, not one single thing was said in those respective interviews that the American people should not be able to see, should not be able to hear. Republicans have really seized on it to accuse Democrats of basically trying to impeach Trump in private. The tragedy here and the crime here is that the American people don't get to see what's going on in these sessions.

Of hiding important work from the American people and from the press who might be able to evaluate it. And the Democrats argue, though, that basically this is investigative best practice, that unlike past impeachments, they don't already know what the story is. They need to find out the details. And the best way to investigate it is in private where witnesses can't line up their stories by hearing what somebody else testified, where lawyers can ask most of the questions rather than lawmakers who are maybe trying to fundraise off of some clip or speak to their constituents at a public hearing. And this allows them, ideally, to move quickly and collect a lot of information efficiently. And then they figure out, you know, what have we found and what is the best of what we've got? And they move that then into the public sphere. And they present that evidence. They invite their best witnesses to come and testify.

And they can kind of control the story that they're building against the president. Much like a prosecutor or a district attorney quietly builds a case, makes an announcement of whether or not there's an indictment, and then goes to trial. That's right. The rub, of course, is that this is Congress, and politicians love to blab. They get information that looks damaging to the president if you're a Democrat. You'd love for that to get out. So what's the situation on Monday when it comes to these hearings, to what's actually happening in that skiff behind those closed doors? So for most of the day Monday, all I know is that this former White House official, Fiona Hill, is in there testifying. And it's hour after hour after hour.

There's very little information coming out. My feet are getting sore. Hey, you still free? Chit-chatting with other reporters, basically waiting for any kind of emissary to come out of the room and give us a sense of what's going on. It seems pretty quiet.

I think Schiff just left to go. He's speaking at the 92nd Street Y. You're just spending the day standing outside this room. Right. How many hours do you think you've spent standing, waiting, doing nothing so far? I don't know. Probably north

of 30 hours. 35 hours. But it'll get worse. And it was a long day. And eventually the sun goes down. Fiona Hill is still not done. And she finally leaves about 8 o'clock. Bye, thank you.

I just kind of had to go home because, like, there was not a whole lot more reporting to do here. And it was only as I was walking back up to my apartment building that I started hearing from some sources and being able to piece together over the next couple of hours what had actually happened that day. And the testimony, it turns out, was pretty remarkable. What was the testimony? So you got to keep in mind, Fiona Hill is a respected career Russia expert who was brought in to the Trump administration to work for John Bolton on the National Security Council as one of the president's top advisors on Europe and Russia policy. So she's right at the center of

traditional decision-making around policy towards Ukraine. And the account that she gives is that there was a meeting earlier this summer in July where several other diplomats, including Gordon Sondland, a former Trump donor who had become ambassador to the European Union, met with some Ukrainian officials. And she tells lawmakers that this meeting veered dangerously off course from her perspective. And she and her boss, John Bolton, were so alarmed by what was said that Bolton told her, you need to go to White House lawyers right now and tell them that we're not part of, and this was a quote, whatever drug deal these guys are cooking up. Wow. The president's private lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, were basically holding out from the Ukrainians a White House meeting with President Trump, which is what they wanted, as leverage for the Ukrainians agreeing to investigate Democrats and Democratic issues that could benefit the president politically. Hill also testified that at one point Bolton referred to Giuliani as a hand grenade that's going to blow everybody up.

And so we were able to basically pull together this and some other elements of the story and publish it, I think, about 10.30 at night and really be able to tell the story of day one behind those closed doors. So beyond this being a very juicy scoop, what's the significance of the testimony that Fiona Hill gave? What does it do for the inquiry? So there are a couple things that I would say. One is that she implicates her boss, John Bolton, who is a bold-faced name in Washington. He's the president's top national security advisor. And saying that high up in the chain, the president's national security advisor is calling this a drug deal, was so concerned about this, he had me go to the lawyers. And it kind of opened the door to the fact that this set of events that we're learning about in retrospect, we're setting off alarms in real time and at very high levels of the government. The other aspect of it, though, is that I'm looking ahead to the rest of the week, and it seems pretty clear she's not going to be the last person.

head to the rest of the week and it seems pretty clear she's not going to be the last person. Unlike in past investigations where the White House has successfully shut down Congress, important witnesses are coming and they're going to talk and they're going to tell their story. We're actually going to understand what happened here. Nick, I guess I just have like a collegial inquiry here. What's the point of standing around all day if you end up getting the best stuff when you get home at like 10 o'clock at night. Doesn't that suggest that maybe you're not going about this the most efficient way? It's a fair point, but we do learn some pretty significant details that set the stage for the rest of the week. Okay, so what happens the next day on Tuesday?

Ready for day two. So on Tuesday, we know that there is going to be another one of these closed door depositions. It's probably going to go on again for hours, this time with a senior State Department official who was more or less in charge of Ukraine policy for the State Department. But the first thing that I notice as I arrive at the Capitol is that, like, the place has been transformed overnight. So Nick just walked away because he got a call from a member of Congress. After two weeks of recess, lawmakers are back. Madam Speaker, will there be a formal vote on an impeachment inquiry?

There are even tourists wandering around through the skip area, running into reporters. In part to keep an eye on the British. Yeah, it's somewhere up there. Oh, wait, there we go. Stopping, looking at the TV reporters who they recognize from CNN. Have you guys heard of the whole beach band fire? Yeah. Press Corps seems to have somehow doubled.

I don't know how, because it's already been huge following this stuff. And there's just kind of an energy gripping the place that comes with 535 or so lawmakers and their staff, their kind of entourages being back, moving around the Capitol. Can any member of Congress walk into the skiff right by you and actually listen to these depositions as testimony? The answer is no, and we actually saw it a couple times this week when Republicans tried to go in and sit in on these depositions, but they were not on the committees that are leading the

investigation. And therefore, under the committee rules, they ended up getting kicked out. But with lawmakers back in town, you're talking about three committees that are leading the impeachment investigation. That's dozens and dozens of lawmakers that sit on those. And they can all go and sit in and they can come out and they're not supposed to talk in detail about what transpired. But they can give general impressions and hints about what they heard. In one case, one Democrat came out and basically broke the rules and just talked about what was happening completely. How did the questioning go today, Jeremy? I thought it was very powerful testimony.

And what did this Democrat divulge? So he comes out and says... Here is a senior State Department official responsible for six countries, one of which is Ukraine. That he just heard the witness in the room, a State Department official named George Kent. Who found himself outside of a parallel process that he felt was undermining 28 years of U.S. policy in promoting the rule of law in Ukraine. That he and other career diplomats who were in charge of State Department's policy toward Ukraine had been shoved aside. You know, all of the people charged with policy in Ukraine were replaced, apparently,

after a May 23rd meeting at the White House organized by Mick Mulvaney, not John Bolton or Pompeo. And were told, starting late in the spring, that basically their services weren't needed anymore. And that was wrong. He used that word wrong. That policy towards Ukraine was going to be run by Gordon Sondland and Rudy Giuliani and others out of the White House. The import of this testimony is deeply disturbing, especially the role of Rudy Giuliani. And they may as well lay low.

And what's the significance of that? So the significance of that is that you have here another high-level American diplomat saying that the normal channels for foreign policy that have guided American policy for quite a long time are being stepped on basically by the White House, which is putting their own guys in charge. And one of them that he singles out yet again is Gordon Sondland.

Now you have a second witness, two in two days, coming forward and giving a pretty consistent account. This is all picking up a little bit of momentum. So I'm taking it you didn't watch the Democratic debate. I did not watch the Democratic debate, and I did not watch playoff baseball. I did not watch the Democratic debate and I did not watch playoff baseball. What if we take a 20 minute break and I can go and satisfy my editors a little bit by updating some stories?

Yeah. All right. We'll be back as we say. OK. More soon. Thanks, Nick. You guys going to hang here? Yeah. OK. More soon. Thanks, Nick. You guys going to hang here? Yeah. Okay. Should we go to break there? That was the idea.

See ya. Okay. So Wednesday. Wednesday. Another day, another diplomat. This time, it's a senior advisor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who quit the State Department last week, reportedly because he was so frustrated by the very things that we're talking about. He tried to raise alarms by that and didn't get a response, and he was so fed up, he said he quit. He tried to raise alarms by that and didn't get a response. And he was so fed up, he said he quit. So it's clear after three days of testimony that we're starting to see the diplomatic and foreign policy kind of core, the expertise, the professional class that handles American foreign policy through Democratic and Republican administrations. Republican administrations basically coming one by one to tell a remarkably consistent story about how in ways that they were uncomfortable with and they had not seen before, they were getting pushed aside and the policy that was being, you know, executed in their place, they would say it's not even a policy, but the actions in their place, you know, basically rather

than to put it in their words, the policy serving the well-being of the Ukrainians in the United States, it was serving the well-being of the president of the United States. And that was about it. But how exactly is that the basis of an impeachment inquiry? they see is so problematic. They're telling a story about what happened once they were pushed aside. They think that's created a set of conditions that led to these events that are at the heart of the impeachment inquiry. And that's really what investigators are trying to get the bottom of. And now they've been able to establish how the kind of circumstances or the scene was set for those things to happen by these current and former diplomats but they still have more investigative work to flesh that out okay we're walking up all right so i'm gonna just watch if that's okay yeah so in the middle of all this on

wednesday i meet up with my colleague cheryl stulberg yeah we'll probably go one of those tables it'll be a standing interview i I hope not, but, you know, the guy's got to get his steps in. And we're going to go upstairs into the Capitol to interview Adam Schiff, the Democratic congressman who chairs the Intelligence Committee and is the man at the center of all these hearings

leading the impeachment investigation. We had been hoping to sit down with Schiff in his office and have a kind of quieter, more reflective meeting. But indicative of the way things are in the middle of this inquiry, his staff asked instead if we could meet in a reception room. So let's take this corner. Right off the floor of the Capitol where there were different meet and greets going on and constituents were meeting with their members of Congress and the room was, you know, buzzing and lively.

And we staked out a corner where we could talk to congressmanship. How you doing? Good. I'm here in Cheryl's over here. Hi, how are you? And we were able to put to him some kind of key questions about what we thought was going on to see how he sees it. The president talks a lot about the deep state.

Does it strike you that this is exactly what he fears or what he thinks of as the deep state? You know, the deep state theory used to be a fringe theory for third world countries or kooky conspiracy theorists at home. When the president talks about the deep state, what he's really talking about is, in particular, people that expose his wrongdoing and misconduct. At one point, we put the question to him of what he made of all these diplomats coming forward and telling this story. You know, there's no revolt and there's no deep state. He quibbled a little bit with the wording that Cheryl used,

but he basically said, I agree with the premise of the question. I think it's a very serious attack on career public servants who are unwilling to compromise themselves in the president's service. Will you see your last question? Because I've got to go vote on the last vote. I have two more really quickies. No, do you have enough evidence to impeach? I've got to go vote.

Can he come back, or is that it? Ask. I'll check. So another busy day. Where is your head as Wednesday comes to an end? questions about these various kind of accusations and accounts that investigators have been getting all week and figuring out, you know, how does he explain this stuff? How does he view what was going on? And, you know, we left the Capitol Wednesday evening waiting to see exactly what he was going to say. Right. Like if this is a play, the character that everyone's been talking

about for the last 90 minutes eventually has to come on stage and say something. That's right. Except for in this case, the stage is behind closed doors. And saying something, it turns out, amounts to releasing an 18-page opening statement Thursday morning right before he begins to answer questions. Hello. Hi.

Welcome. Very nice to see you. Very nice to see you. Very nice to see you. So that's how Thursday morning begins. I walk into the Capitol with Rachel and Claire, just as it seems you are digesting Gordon Sondland's opening statement. So my morning was basically spent trying to go through 18 pages of what he was going to go in there and say, right.

We received a copy of his opening statement, and Mike Schmidt, our colleague and I, poured through it to try and figure out what's new here, what's he addressing, what does he have to say. And a couple of things jumped out at us. He basically says in a meeting that he had with President Trump in May, not long after the new Ukrainian president was elected, President Trump basically rejected Sondland's advice and the advice of other diplomats that were with him,

who said, you know, Mr. President, we think you ought to meet with this new guy. We think he's going to do good work. Trump didn't seem interested and then directed them, Sondland said, to go through Rudy Giuliani, to go through his private lawyer. On Ukraine foreign policy. He gave Sondland, his ambassador to the European Union and other high-ranking officials in the room, the direct impression that he had empowered Rudy Giuliani to basically run American policy toward Ukraine. Wow. I mean, all week we'd been hearing these career nonpartisan diplomats coming in and pointing at Gordon Sondland. And here you have Gordon Sondland turning around just as quickly

and pointing at the president and Rudy Giuliani and saying, everything I did, I did because they told me to. And I didn't always feel good about it. I don't think Rudy Giuliani should have been involved. I think the men and women of the State Department ought to be running our foreign policy, he testified. But I have to follow the directions of the president. And I thought more or less that I could work within those parameters to still achieve an end that I believed in, to still help Ukraine. And he says something interesting. He says, I didn't realize at first, it was only later that I realized that Rudy Giuliani may have had some other motivations in mind. As if all of this is not enough, one of the president's loyal diplomats seeming to turn on him and point the finger back at him. Hello. How are you? Mr. Scheer. Good to see you. My colleague Mike Scheer walks up.

I'm just going to say any email that starts with this will be interesting. I want to read the rest of it. Oh, geez. And says, hey, the White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who never addresses the press, has just scheduled a 1230 press conference at the White House. He's going to talk to reporters. And we think he's going to talk about Ukraine. But, I mean, he should get a lot of questions about this stuff, about impeachment.

He takes questions. Well, I mean, he's going to the White House press briefing room. So Mike and I go back to a press room just outside the skip and set up shop around his computer where we tune into this press conference. What's happening? We're with Nick Vandos and Mike Scherer watching. this press conference. He starts to field questions and it gets crazy really fast. Did he also mention to me in the past that the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that's it. And that's why we held up the money. Now, there was a report. server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that's it. And that's why we held up the money. After this week of kind of slow drip disclosures and after weeks of the White House denying that there had been any kind of leverage or quid pro quo or exchange with the Ukrainians around the

suspension of security aid for the country, he comes out and basically says, he does say on the record that... So the demand for an investigation into the Democrats was part of the reason that he wanted to withhold funding to Ukraine. The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation. And that is absolutely appropriate. The White House withheld the aid for several reasons, and one of those reasons was President Trump wanted Ukraine to first commit to investigating potential collusion between Ukrainians and Democrats in the 2016 election that was meant to undermine his campaign. And on top of it, Mulvaney says, yep, this was the deal. But to be clear, what you just described is a quid pro quo. Reporters quickly call that a quid pro quo.

But to be clear, what you just described is a quid pro quo. Reporters quickly call that a quid pro quo. It is. Funding will not flow unless the investigation into the Democratic server happens as well. We do that all the time with foreign policy. And he said, that's fine. It happens all the time. There's nothing wrong with it. If you read the news reports and you believe them, what did McKinney say yesterday? McKinney said yesterday that he was really upset with the political influence in foreign policy. That was one of the reasons he was so upset about this.

And I have news for everybody. Get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy. I mean, that's an extraordinary thing for the White House chief of staff to say. It is. And he goes a little bit further. He's asked about Rudy Giuliani and his role. And his defense, again, is essentially that the president of the United States gets to dictate foreign policy. And if he wants his personal lawyer, a guy who is not paying, a guy who's doing business, by the way, in Ukraine at the same time he's evidently doing diplomacy, to run American foreign policy, well, that's his prerogative. Elections have consequences. And that's OK. There's nothing wrong withative. Elections have consequences, and that's okay.

There's nothing wrong with it. Elections do have consequences, and they should, and your foreign policy is going to change. Obama did it in one way. We're doing it a different way, and there's no problem with that. It's a pretty stunning assertion, a pretty stunning view of executive power. It suggests the White House has not been telling the whole truth up till today. And then decided to tell it in a kind of extreme, unexpected

way. Right. It's a little baffling to understand what exactly Mick Mulvaney was doing here. I'm not going to take any more. But it's nice to see everybody. Thanks again. All right, so we should get on the phone.

There's also probably about to be a house vote where we may need to go and get some, see if we can't get some quick reaction. You know, it was pretty evident in the hour or so after that press conference that lawmakers on Capitol Hill didn't quite know what to make of it either. Today, the chief of staff said what we've always suspected, that it was also about exonerating Russia and looking at the 2016 election. Some said, well, they just admitted to the whole thing, I suppose. So what do we do now? Others, Adam Schiff said...

It certainly indicates that things have gone from very, very bad to much, much worse. A story that's very, very bad just got much, much worse. Well, to the extent, Nick, that it's knowable, what do you make of why the White House decided to do this? It's kind of hard to understand. It is. We don't know if Mulvaney was acting on his own authority, who had put him out there. The president's legal team, one of his other lawyers, who's not Rudy Giuliani, said he hadn't been consulted before Mulvaney went out there. You know, there has been a

move that President Trump returns to time and again in his presidency. And part of me wonders if this isn't the same thing, where when he's being accused of something bad, of having done something under the table or that would be deemed inappropriate for others, instead of pretending he didn't, he just kind of throws it all out into the open and says, you know, yeah, I did this, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it. So what? Tell me it's wrong. And I think, you know, at the end of this week, one of the biggest questions that I think emerges from all this stuff is that it's now up to Congress, not just Democrats, but Republicans too, to answer that question and say, is this right or is this wrong? If he's going

to own up to most of it and assuming that more officials come forward and fill in different pieces of this story as we're coming to understand it, you know, can they stomach that? And is that a transgression that they're willing to say is worthy of impeachment and worthy of his removal from office? I mean, it's kind of, on the president's part, potentially, you know, the ultimate high-stakes bluff. And I don't think we know yet where things are going to fall out. I think what we're left with at the end of this week is like a question. Is this a story of a bunch of career diplomats

who have never really much liked President Trump or his policies rebelling against him. And I don't think that they really see it that way. From their perspective, you know, they're used to having policy differences with presidents of both parties. They're trained to implement the policies of Republicans and of Democrats.

What I think is different, what is, you know, leading otherwise anonymous officials to blow the whistle, to march up to Capitol Hill and walk down all those flights of steps to the House skiff and tell the story as they see it, is that they see this as something fundamentally different. And importantly, as a part of their responsibility as, you know, permanent agents of the government, of people who are working on behalf of the American people, not a particular president. And that only when things seem to get so bad did they decide they needed to speak up. Nick, thank you for essentially giving us your entire week.

We appreciate it. It was a pleasure to have the company. It can get lonely in front of a skiff, I imagine. Thank you, truly. Yeah, I'm glad you guys were here. It's been quite a story. The rest. So on Thursday night, there's a huge bipartisan outcry,

and the White House Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, tries to walk back his comments about a quid pro quo with Ukraine. He issues a statement essentially denying what he has said just a few hours earlier. And I'm going to read you the quote. He said, let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election. We'll be right back. How does it sound? It sounds pretty good. Sound okay?

I've never actually produced a bit of audio on my own. Okay, great. And I think this is definitely the first time we have done the headlines of the daily inside the Senate Press Gallery. Okay. Cheryl Solberg. Oh, I think I'm supposed to hold this to my own mouth. So Cheryl, what do we need to know today? So it was a really busy news day.

Today, I'm proud to report, thanks to the strong leadership of President Donald Trump and the strong relationship between President Erdogan and Turkey and the United States of America. That today, the United States and Turkey have agreed to a ceasefire in Syria. Vice President Pence flew to Turkey and on Thursday afternoon, he announced that Turkey had agreed to a ceasefire in which the Turkish government would suspend its military operations in northern Syria for five days in order to give the Kurds time to clear the area. So that raises a question. Is this a breakthrough or is this just giving Turkey

what it wants in the first place because they wanted the Kurds out? What else? Will you support this deal? What do you think of it? From what we've read of this deal, it doesn't meet our demands or expectations. There's finally a deal for Brexit that the European Union and Britain both think will work. But it's not clear if it's going to pass because it has to go through Parliament

and the Labour Party has already said it's opposed. We are unhappy with this deal, and as it stands, we'll vote against it. And finally on Thursday, it was a sad day here in the Capitol because Representative Elijah Cummings, a towering figure in the House, died. Cummings was a son of sharecroppers. His own presence here was really a miracle to him. My father had never been in the Capitol building. He said, isn't this a place where they used to call us slaves? I said, yes, sir. And isn't this a place they used to call us three-fifths of a man? I said,

yes, sir. And isn't this a place that they used to call us chattel? I said, yes, yes, yes, sir. And I'll never forget, he said, when I think about you being sworn in today, he said, now I see what I could have been if I'd had an opportunity. And over the last year, as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, he had been a central figure in the investigations of the president.

And in his role in these investigations, he continually pleaded for decency. We are better than this. We are so much, we really are. As a country, we are so much better than this. And I'm hoping that all of us can get back to this democracy that we want and that we should be passing on to our children so that they can do better than what we did. Cheryl, thank you. Thank you, Michael. We're walking out.

9.5 p.m. We appear to be the last journalist inside the U.S. Capitol. Feels like a good time to talk about who made the shows this week. The Daily is made by Theo Balcom, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lindsay Garrison, Annie Brown, Claire Tennisgetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon-Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson. Walking and doing credits at the same time. Challenging.

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Michaela Bouchard, Julia Simon, Stella Tan, Lauren Jackson, and the entire Washington Bureau of the Times. That's it for The Daily. I am a very out-of-breath Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.