The NPR Politics Podcast - Hill Calls Investigations A "Domestic Political Errand"; Holmes Details Trump Call

Episode Date: November 21, 2019

In what may be the final day of public hearings, members of Congress heard from a former White House policy insider and a foreign service officer who said he overheard a call with President Trump. In this episode: political correspondent Scott Detrow, Congressional correspondent Susan Davis, and justice correspondent Ryan Lucas. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Ava, Leah, and Kayla, and currently we're in line at the last impeachment hearing. We're going to hear the testimony of Fiona Hill and David Holmes. This podcast was recorded at 2.40 Eastern on Thursday, November 21st. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but one thing's for certain, our feet are probably still going to be sore from waiting in line for literally hours. Now they know what it's like to be a reporter on stakeout standing in these hallways for hours on end. I feel you guys. The knees hurt.

I hope they got in. I hope they did, too. It's very limited attendance and a lot of demand. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Susan Davis. I cover the campaign. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department.

And I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. Committee will come to order. So this could be, probably will be, but we don't know for sure, the final day of impeachment testimony. If you would please rise, raise your right hand. I will begin by swearing you in. We heard from David Holmes, a State Department staffer in the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. While it is an honor to appear before you today, I want to make clear that I did not seek this opportunity to testify today. And from former top National Security Council director for Europe and Russia, Fiona Hill.

Mr. Chairman, ranking member Nunes and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to testify before you today. I have a short opening statement. So let's start with this. These are not people we've spent a ton of time talking about on the podcast, unlike a Mr. Ambassador Gordon Sondland. What were lawmakers hoping to hear from Holmes and Hill today? Why were they called up? Well, Holmes was sort of a late entry to this narrative of impeachment. We didn't even know about him or who he was until Bill Taylor, the top diplomat in Ukraine, testified last week. David Holmes is a staffer in the embassy who worked for former Ambassador Marie Ivanovich and then also reported to Bill Taylor, in which he recounted to Taylor, which he first made the public aware of in his testimony, that the day after the July 25th phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky, David Holmes went to lunch with another familiar character in the story, EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland. And Holmes overheard a conversation between Sondland and President Trump

in which he hears the president ask directly about the status of those investigations that he was seeking. Yeah, he clarified whether he was in Ukraine or not. And he said, yes, I'm here in Ukraine. And then Ambassador Sondland said, he loves your ass, he'll do anything you want. He said, he can do the investigation. He was also asked at a certain point, you know, why do you remember this so clearly? And he explains it, lays it all out. This was a very distinctive experience.

I've never seen anything like this in my foreign service career. Someone at a lunch in a restaurant making a call on a cell phone to the President of the United States. Being able to hear his voice, it's a very distinctive personality, as we've all seen on television. Very colorful language was used. They were directly addressing something that I had been wondering about working on for weeks and even months. And the other thing that was interesting to me about Holmes is that he seemed to first be called to testify to talk about this specific instance. But then he sits down and he has a lot to say, a lot to say, like a very long opening

statement about the broader picture here and what he saw going on at the president's orders or from what he thought were the president's orders. The three priorities of security, economy and justice and our support for Ukrainian democratic resistance to Russian aggression became overshadowed by a political agenda promoted by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and a cadre of officials operating with a direct channel to the White House. I mean, again, he is one more witness who has testified. Gordon Sondland is another one. Kurt Volker is another one. Bill Taylor is another one, who all testified as seeing Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, as a troublesome, meddlesome or worrisome figure in the course of trying to enact U.S.-Ukraine policy

as they understood it as official U.S. policy. So those are the main headlines from Holmes, but I think the person who got more attention today is Fiona Hill. And before we dig into what she said about Ukraine and the pressure campaign, I thought it was interesting that this is yet another immigrant or son or daughter of immigrants who has been front and center in testimony this week. This has just been a really interesting, broader theme. That's right. She's British born. She has, I think what to Americans might sound like a very fancy British accent, but as she made clear in her testimony, she is apparently from a place in Britain where it's sort of seen as like a lower class accent. I do not speak varying degrees of British accents, but it was interesting.

It's a Northeastern English accent. Yeah, but I guess it's more of like a working class accent. Apparently that's a thing. Not an accent featured prominently in season three of The Crown. Years later, I can say with confidence that this country has offered me opportunities I never would have had in England. I grew up poor with a very distinctive working class accent. And Hill joins people like Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman and former Ambassador Marie

Yovanovitch as foreign born people who became naturalized citizens, and have essentially spent their lives serving the country, their second country, their adopted country. So Hill filled in a lot of details about what happened over the course of the summer and really describes this gradual collision between the National Security Council staffers, foreign policy advisors, and people like Sondland, who are more focused on trying to pressure Ukraine into announcing this investigation into Biden in 2016. She used a lot of colorful language, mostly by quoting former Ambassador John Bolton, the National Security Advisor at the time, talking about Rudy Giuliani throwing a hand grenade into everything. And he then, in the course of that discussion, said that Rudy Giuliani was a hand

grenade that was going to blow everyone up. Did you understand what he meant by that? I did, actually. What did he mean? Well, I think he meant that obviously what Mr. Giuliani was saying was pretty explosive in any case. He was frequently on television making quite incendiary remarks about everyone involved in this, and that he was clearly pushing forward issues and ideas that would, you know, probably come back to haunt us. And in fact, I think that that's where we are today. So did we learn anything new from Hill? One thing that she did talk about that I thought was one of the moments in the testimony that I think people will probably see replaying on their televisions too, is that she talked about Gordon Sondland, because they had these kind of contradictory testimonies about who was the

irregular channel, who was the official channel. And she offered this rather lengthy statement today in which I don't want to say she didn't apologize to Gordon Sondland, but she essentially said after understanding what he said and what he was working on, it was further clear to her that he was working at the behest of the president. She just wasn't aware of that and that it became very clear to her that there were these two channels. But she couldn't get mad at him because she thought he was he was trying to subvert her because he was being involved in a domestic political errand and we were being involved in national security foreign policy and those two things had just diverged so he was correct and i had not put my finger on the at that at the moment but i was irritated with him and angry with him that he wasn't fully coordinating.

You can hear why Democrats wanted Fiona Hill to be potentially their closing witness. David Holmes was added late to the schedule. Originally, they had planned just to have her solo as you know, as of right now, we have no more further depositions or public witnesses to go. There could be more announced. But as of right now, she could be the final word on this. And I think her speaking to the broader national security concerns are a point that Democrats want to land on politically, because the question of impeachment is going to go to this sort of big idea of was the president, you know, hurting national security for his own political interests. Yes, this was definitely the most succinct summation that we have had from one of the witnesses about the problem with this alternative channel. And the fact that you heard

her say that Gordon Sondland, what he was doing was all signed off on by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, by the acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Those people were keyed in on it. But it was a domestic political errand. Whereas the national security folks, the National Security Council, State Department, the other people that we have heard from testifying about the problem with this irregular channel, they were working on national security. Those are two very different things. And that's a question that Republicans are going to struggle to push back against. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about how Republicans responded to Hill.

And we're also going to talk about what comes next after all these public hearings. As the impeachment clock is ticking in the United States, Ukraine is in a race to fix a broken system before time runs out. It's just frightening because it's fast. A new look at the country on the other side of the impeachment scandal on Rough Translation from NPR. Okay, we're back. One of the big themes of the hearings this week has been Republicans and Democrats like getting two alternate universes of facts out of these hearings. And I feel like

Gordon Sondland's testimony yesterday was the most extreme example. How did Republicans respond to what Hill had to say today? Well, you saw the ranking member, Devin Nunes, on the committee engage in this exchange with her, which goes to the core of the Republican events. You know, Republicans aren't really disputing that the events at hand happen. We're all kind of agreement on the basic timeline and the basic facts. Their argument broadly has been, sure, the president did these things. Sure, the president has taken actions that upset these career officials in the national security community. But he's the president. The commander in chief sets the foreign policy. And these are his prerogatives. They're not essentially impeachable offenses. And Devin Nunes essentially

said that to her. Isn't this just the right of the president to decide policy as he sees fit? And she had this response where she said, sure, look, that is the prerogative of the president. But if that was the prerogative in the foreign policy direction of the United States, he didn't tell any of the people who are charged with enacting that very foreign policy. And then we also heard more of what we've been hearing all week, this argument that there was no quid pro quo here because, of course, the aid was released and there was no investigation. Therefore, how can it be pressure? Jim Jordan, who has been leading the attacks all week for Republicans, made that point today. To get the call, to get the meeting and to get the money, there had to be an announcement.

They got the call, they got the meeting, they got the money and there was no announcement. That's as clear as it gets, and the American people see that. I think that is going to be the key defense going forward. If this is the end of the public phase, I think you're going to hear that over and over and over. The things that they wanted didn't happen, ergo, not impeachable offense. Now, he's leaving out a bit of context to be fair. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. So, yes, the Ukrainians did indeed get a call with the White House on July 25th. That did happen. They did get the money on September 11th after a 55-day hold for which the White House has yet to provide a reason behind the hold to anyone involved in the government or in the public.

And they released the hold on September 11th only after Congress began investigating Rudy Giuliani and the president's efforts to get Ukraine to launch investigations into the Bidens. When there was growing political pressure on the administration on this very question is when that aid was released. That is important context. There's also an important aspect to this that Jordan didn't get into in that clip there, but that has been a frequent point that we have heard from Republicans, which is Zelensky hasn't complained about pressure. The Ukrainians say that everything's fine. There's been no problem here. What Holmes said is that, you know, yes, they may have said that, but Ukraine still needs the United States. Ukraine still needs a good relationship with the Trump administration because they need American support in the conflict with Russia. They need

American political and military support in that conflict. And they're not really in a position where they can just slap the Trump administration in the face and say full-throatedly that there is something wrong with this relationship, which isn't to say that there is something wrong, but you can't take Ukrainian statements necessarily at face value on this issue. So let's shift to two of Sue's favorite things to talk about, timelines and politics. And let's add holidays and congressional schedules. And, you know, I don't know what else we can do. It's my wheelhouse. So they're leaving for a week. We've got Thanksgiving coming up. I'm excited about Thanksgiving, but that's not the point of this. What happens next? Are we done with public hearings, at least in the Intelligence Committee? So I talked to Joaquin Castro. He's a Democrat

on the Intelligence Committee about this today. The short answer is no one really knows. But what he said was, and he's on the committee, that they have no more plans for depositions or public hearings. He essentially said, everyone we know we can hear from, we've heard from. There's a lot of people the committee would like to hear from that haven't come forward. People like Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney or former National Security Advisor John Bolton. So there's a lot of big questions still about next steps and how this is going to play out. All right. So a lot happened this week. We were on live radio for a good chunk of this week.

There is a lot to process and talk about in the big picture way. Luckily, we have a weekly roundup for that. And that is exactly what we will do tomorrow. We'll be back in your feed with that. We also have two live shows coming up, one in Chicago on January 10th, another one at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. That is on January 22nd. You can get a ticket at nprpresents.org. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign.

I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.