The Daily - The Whistle-Blower’s Complaint

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

The whistle-blower complaint at the center of the impeachment inquiry was released on Thursday as the Trump administration official who had declined to turn it over — Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence — testified before Congress. Here’s the latest from Capitol Hill. Guest: Julie Hirschfeld Davis, the congressional editor for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: The complaint accused President Trump of pressuring Ukraine’s leader to investigate a political rival and alleged that the White House tried to “lock down” the transcript of the call.Here’s what we’ve learned about the whistle-blower.Read a declassified version of the complaint, with annotations, and eight takeaways from the document.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the whistleblower complaint at the center of the impeachment inquiry is released as the Trump administration official who had refused to turn it over testifies before Congress. The latest from Capitol Hill. It's Friday, September 27th. Julie? Yes, I'm here. Hey. Hey. Good morning, I'm Kenneth Wooten. And I'm Janine Norman here. The top five things to know this Thursday. Number one, the impeachment inquiry in Washington. So how does Thursday begin?

So Thursday begins with everyone anticipating, possibly seeing what is in this whistleblower complaint. A whistleblower complaint about President Trump's phone call to Ukraine is expected to be declassified and released today. declassified and released today. The day before, we had all gotten to see a copy of a version of a transcript of a call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine. And we knew that the whistleblower complaint was related to that call. Julie Davis is the congressional editor at The Times. But it was also clear that there was more to the complaint than just that call. And we were all waiting to see whether it would be released and what it would say.

We start with the Fox News alert. The explosive whistleblower complaint declassified overnight. And in just a few hours, the director of national intelligence will have to answer to lawmakers about that report. When we woke up Thursday morning, everyone was anticipating a big hearing that was going to take place on Capitol Hill. Soon we will hear what McGuire has to say, but there are questions about what we will hear from him. How far can the DNI go in an open session? Where the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph McGuire, who was the official who was in possession of this whistleblower complaint but had withheld it from Congress, was going to come and testify. And as it turned out, a few moments before the hearing began...

We've got breaking news as we come on the air in the impeachment inquiry into President Trump just moments ago. The Intelligence Committee sent out the unclassified version of the complaint. Okay, so tell me about this document. So the document is a pretty long memo. It's very detailed and has a lot of legislative citations in it. My first impression was that this was a person who really knew what they were doing and was being very careful about the way that they were laying out this episode that they were recounting.

laying out this episode that they're recounting. The second thing was, as a reporter, to me it really felt like an investigative document. Like someone had done a lot of digging and cross-referencing and talking to people, talking to his colleagues, to try to figure out what was actually going on here. And he had pieced together a pretty compelling and pretty damning picture of what he is alleging

the president and the president's team has been up to when it comes to their interactions with Ukraine. So would you actually read from it? Sure. So it's addressed to Chairman Burr and Chairman Schiff, who are the Senate and House Intelligence Committee chairman. And he writes, I am reporting an urgent concern in accordance with the procedures outlined in 50 U.S. Code Section 3033K5A. This letter is unclassified in all caps when separated from the attachment. Right. It's pretty formal.

It's very formal. And I'll just stop here to say it's written in such a way that you can tell that this person is being careful to make it very difficult for the administration to try to withhold or somehow suppress what it is that he's trying to complain about. What do you mean? There's a bullet point a little bit further down on the second page where it says, if a classification marking is applied retroactively, I believe it is incumbent upon the classifying authority to explain why such a marking was applied and to which specific information it pertains.

It's almost like he's talking to whatever official might be asked to go back and classify, that is to say, strike out or redact certain sections of this and saying, hey, buddy, you better make sure that there's a legal reason that you're able to do that, because I am trying to make sure that people see what I have to say. He's reaching out to a future kind of censor within the Trump administration saying, don't do that. Certainly seems like that, yeah. Okay, so I wonder if you can resume your reading. So I'll go back to the first page. He says, in the course of my official duties, I've received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.

The president's personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well. That's a lot of information packed into a few sentences. Right. And he goes on, Over the past four months, more than half a dozen U.S. officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort. It is routine for U.S. officials with responsibility for a particular regional or functional portfolio to share such information with one another in order to inform policymaking and analysis. I was not a direct witness to most of the events described.

However, I found my colleagues' accounts of these events to be credible, because in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another. So then after that sort of introduction, the complaint gets into this July 25th phone call between President Trump and President Zelensky, with which we are now fairly familiar. But he offers some new information about the call that we didn't previously know. So he writes, He writes, based on my understanding, there were approximately a dozen White House officials who listened to the call, a mixture of policy officials and duty officers in the White House Situation Room, as is customary. The officials I spoke with told me that participation in the call had not been restricted in advance because everyone expected it would be a routine call with a foreign leader. And this is the point where the whistleblower turns from the conversation itself to the aftermath of the call.

In the days following the phone call, he says, I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to, quote-unquote, lock down all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced, as is customary by the White House Situation Room. This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call. He writes, White House officials told me they were, quote unquote,

directed by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored for coordination, finalization, and distribution to cabinet-level officials.

Instead, the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature. One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective. So if this complaint is to be believed, the people in this room, the dozen or so people who were listening in on the president's call to Ukrainian President Zelensky, very quickly interpreted what they were hearing to be something quite serious and something that needed to be restricted. Not because of the national security content, but because it was so politically sensitive. That's right. At least some of them felt that they had just listened to a conversation that

was highly inappropriate and that it would be a big problem if it ever got out. And so they took actions to make sure, essentially, that it wouldn't. Although what we now know is that, of course, a bunch of people went to the whistleblower and said, even though this thing has been specially stored and kind of people, whether White House officials or other people in the administration, who heard or saw elements of this episode and were profoundly concerned by it. And they all had conversations about it. And ultimately, this is the one person who decided to come forward. And interestingly, the whistleblower says later on in an appendix of the complaint that this is not the first time that information like this has been handled this way. was placed into this code word level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive rather than national security sensitive information. So the pattern being that the president has freewheeling,

potentially inappropriate conversations with foreign leaders and then locks them away, not for the normal reasons, but just because they may be embarrassing. Right. And the idea being that there are multiple officials around him, potentially including White House lawyers, who have gotten into this habit of, okay, this is how you treat a conversation like this. We just put it in the code word level system so that others inside the government who might be alarmed by this or might see something wrong with this don't ever see it. Julie, is there anything else of note in this whistleblower's complaint? acted on their own to reinforce this essentially threat that he was making

or pressure campaign that he was trying to impose on the Ukrainian president. So he talks about how he had learned that in mid-May, President Trump instructs Vice President Mike Pence to cancel a planned trip that he had to go to Ukraine to attend Zelensky's inauguration. He also says that it was, quote- quote unquote, made clear to people around President Trump that he didn't want to meet with President Zelensky until he saw him choose to act in office, essentially until he started doing what it was that Trump had asked him to do. And so he writes, I do not know how this guidance was communicated or by whom,

but he essentially is suggesting that this was all of a piece. This was all sort of a coordinated campaign directed by the president and also just initiated by people around him who knew what he wanted to have happen to essentially make it clear to Zelensky that there was something that President Trump wanted. And if he didn't get it, the relationship would suffer. The allegation being that the president enlisted lots of people around him in the federal branch of the government to try to get this favor done for him. Right, and that he had made it so clear in so many different ways that in some cases, some of these officials may have taken it upon themselves

to do what it was that they knew the president wanted. So how did this complaint end up getting from the whistleblower's hands to all of us, to the public, on Thursday morning? Well, that saga was the subject of this hearing on Thursday morning on Capitol Hill before the House Intelligence Committee, which had been trying for weeks to get a copy of this complaint and been stonewalled. The complaint ended up coming out just as the hearing began, but many of the people in that hearing room were very focused on why it had taken so long

to get the complaint in the first place. We'll be right back. So, Julie, tell us about this Intelligence Committee hearing in the House. So the hearing begins with the chairman of the committee, Adam Schiff, giving this really outraged speech. Yesterday, we were presented with the most graphic evidence yet that the president of the United States has betrayed his oath of office. About what the allegations are. For yesterday, we were presented with a record of a call between the president of the United States and the president of Ukraine, in which the president, our president,

sacrificed our national security and our constitution for his personal political benefit. All the Democrats are chomping at the bit to have a chance to question Director McGuire about why they haven't gotten to see this complaint, about what the underlying conduct was. Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you will give today shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? Thank you. Thank you. You may be seated.

Now, the first place you went was to the White House. Am I to understand that from your opening statement? It wasn't to the Department of Justice. The first place you went was to the White House. Am I to understand that from your opening statement? It wasn't to the Department of Justice. The first place you went for a second opinion was to the White House? They really are going after McGuire on the procedure by which he handled this whistleblower complaint, essentially asking him why he shared the complaint and went to the White House and the Department of Justice first before coming to Congress, which is what's laid out in the law. Let me ask you this. Do you think it's appropriate that you go to a department run by someone who's the subject of the complaint to get advice,

or who is a subject of the complaint or implicated in the complaint, for advice as to whether you should provide that complaint to Congress? Did that conflict of interest concern you? And essentially what they're saying is, you had this complaint that had wrongdoing alleged on the part of the president and participation on the part of the attorney general. So then why would you go to the White House and the Department of Justice to ask permission to share that when they're essentially the subject of this complaint?

I'm just asking if the conflict of interest concerned you. Well, sir, I have to work with what I've got, and that is the Office of Legal Counsel within the executive branch. And how does McGuire respond to these very pointed questions of why did you first consult with essentially the accused about how to handle a whistleblower complaint about the accused. McGuire is really trying to play it very carefully here.

It was not stonewalling. I didn't receive direction from anybody. I was just trying to work through the process and the law the way it is written. I have to comply with the way the law is, not the way some people would like it to be. And if I could do otherwise, it would have been much more convenient for me. It is pretty clear from the sequence of events that McGuire actually wanted to handle this whistleblower complaint in the right way. And yet the process ended up being very dissatisfying to members of Congress and they feel like they've been stiffed. So what he says is, repeatedly, he had to follow the law.

It did appear that it has executive privilege. There was a matter, he says, of executive privilege here because this involved the president. If it does have executive privilege, it is the White House that determines that. And so even though there's a statute that says an intelligence whistleblower complaint has got to be brought to Capitol Hill, has got to be shared with the Intelligence Committee, he's saying there was this issue that involved the president and it necessitated that I operate under the rules governing executive privilege. And until executive privilege is determined and cleared, I did not have the authority to be able to send that forward to the committee. Who's in charge of that? The White House and the Department of Justice.

I believe that this matter is unprecedented. Right. He kept using the word unprecedented. It is unprecedented and is probably unprecedented as well. It is unique and unprecedented. And I got the sense that he was a little bit exasperated and trying to explain, look, there are a set of rules around whistleblowers, but nobody wrote those rules thinking that the whistle would be blown on the president. That's right, that this was essentially a choice that he was not going

to get to make on his own. I am not political. I am not partisan. And I did not look to be sitting here as the acting director of national intelligence. I thought that there were perhaps other people who would be best and more qualified to do that. He also seems authentically a bit wary of this whole process and a few times says, you know, I've been in this job for just a few weeks. I am the acting DNI and I was still using Garmin to get to work. My life would have been a heck of a lot simpler without becoming the most famous man in the United States. Don't doubt that at all, sir. My question, sir... It was a sense of, give me a break.

Right. Also a sense of, I don't have anything to do with this. I mean, it is pretty clear from his testimony that he thinks that the matters that are raised in this complaint are a huge deal, and he does not want to be associated with them. And as the members of Congress try to get him to essentially admit some sort of complicity or that he knew something, he keeps reminding them. My first day on the job was Friday the 16th of August, and I think I set a new record in the administration for being subpoenaed before any other time.

Yeah, yeah. You had a heck of a first week, didn't you, sir? Not that much going for me, sir. I've been the DNI for six weeks. As you know, the phone call happened on July 25th of this year. At that time, the DNI was Dan Coats. And at one point, he's even asked if he was told by his predecessor, Dan Coats, who was the director of national intelligence right before he came on board, about this July 25th call or about the whistleblower complaint. Did you discuss the

July 25th call or the whistleblower complaint with DNI Coats? And he essentially says, I wouldn't have taken the job if I did. No, sir. If I'd known, I would not have taken this job. Right. This is sort of the acting director appointment of a lifetime. Right. And he seems to appreciate the irony there. So what happens on the Republican side? The Republicans are pretty much unanimously indignant about this. We've learned the following. The complaint relied on hearsay evidence provided by the whistleblower.

The inspector general did not know the contents of the phone call at issue. The inspector general found the whistleblower displayed arguable political bias against Trump. And they are coming to the president's defense that this is a phishing expedition on the part of the Democrats. I want to congratulate the Democrats on the rollout of their latest information warfare operation against the president. And they essentially are saying, you know, the Democrats have been trying for months and months.

This operation began with media reports from the prime instigators of the Russia collusion hoax. And they couldn't make that case. So now they're kind of grasping for straws on this. So there you go. If the whistleblower operation doesn't work out, the Democrats and their media assets can always drum up something else. I thank you, Director. We are adjourned. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Julie, what do you feel came out of this hearing? I think that what members of Congress got out of this is a real sense that the whistleblower complaint is a serious thing that the intelligence community took very seriously. They're still angry about the fact that it took them a few weeks and a lot of machinations to get a hold of it. But they now have the complaint. So it's almost as if this hearing kind of puts a pin in that and now they move on to, OK, we have this information.

What are we actually going to do with it? And what are they going to do with it? Well, after the hearing, Adam Schiff, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said that. I think the complaint gives us a pretty good roadmap of allegations that we need to investigate. The complaint was going to be a roadmap for the impeachment inquiry, essentially. There is a whole host of people, apparently, who have knowledge of these events. We'll do our best to identify those. We're obviously going to be bringing the whistleblower in. This is now going to form the backbone of their investigation. There had been discussions

among Democrats about, should they have a big expansive inquiry that would wrap in the Mueller report and potential obstruction of justice. I think after today, those questions are pretty much put to rest in the eyes of Democrats. They see this Ukraine matter as the central element of an impeachment case against President Trump. And that is the road they're going to go down. So we are going to see them try to get access to the whistleblower. We're going to see them try to question the officials that are referenced in this complaint, where he talks about people who are concerned, who came to him and shared these accounts that were troubling. And that's going to be the entry point for them

to potentially draft articles of impeachment. Julie, thank you very much. Thanks, Michael. The Times reports that the whistleblower, who remains anonymous, is a CIA officer who once worked at the White House. I want to know, who's the person that gave the whistleblower? Who's the person that gave the whistleblower the information? Because that's supposed to respond. On Thursday, during a private meeting with aides

at the United Nations, President Trump compared the whistleblower's sources to spies, according to audio obtained by the Los Angeles Times, and went on to seemingly threaten both the whistleblower and his sources. You know what

we used to do in the old days, where we were smart, right? The spies and treason. We used to do in the old days where we were smart, right? The spies and treason. We used to handle it a little differently than we do now. During a news conference on Capitol Hill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the impeachment process

would be methodical, open-minded, and fair. There is no rush to judgment. And in some ways, we are a jury, open to what might be exculpatory or not. But every day, the sadness grows because the disregard for our Constitution that the president has becomes more clear. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the Trump administration proposed slashing the size of the American refugee program by almost half, saying it would accept 18,000 refugees over the next year, down from the current limit of 30,000. The White House plans to reserve many of those slots for Iraqis who worked with the U.S. military, as well as persecuted religious minorities, leaving few opportunities for refugees fleeing war and oppression throughout much of the world. The move is part of a broader attempt by the president and his top advisor, Stephen Miller, to reduce the number

of both legal and undocumented immigrants entering the United States. The Daily is made by Theo Balcom, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lindsay Garrison, Annie Brown, Claire Tenesketter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon-Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Thank you. Adiza Egan, Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, Sindhu Jnanasambandam, Jasmine Aguilera, MJ Davis-Lynn, Dan Powell, Sayer Kavedo, and Austin Mitchell. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Michaela Bouchard, Stella Tan, Julia Simon, Caitlin Dickerson,

Manny Fernandez, and Mitch Furman. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you on Monday.