The NPR Politics Podcast - Impeachment Hearings & The 5th Democratic Debate: What To Watch For This Week

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

More hearings in the impeachment hearing are slated for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week. The cast breaks down what to watch for each day. Plus, the democratic candidates face-off for the fifth time on the debate stage Wednesday night. In this episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, national security editor Phil Ewing, and political correspondent Scott Detrow.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

Hi, this is Jaune. We're in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And what did we just do? Vote! Yeah. Vote! We went to go vote. This podcast... Was recorded at... Oh, it was recorded at... That was the tiniest, cutest little voice I've ever heard.

It was recorded at 2.07 p.m. on Monday, the 18th of November. Things may have changed since that time. Okay. Here's the show. Okay. Oh my God, it's so sweet. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith.

I cover the White House. I'm Phil Ewing, election security editor. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And we should say that in that election in Louisiana over the weekend, the results are in. And John Bel Edwards, the Democrat, won re-election. The president had campaigned for his opponent, but John Bel Edwards ended up winning in the end. Democrats had a really good week. They won two of the three governor's races.

They won a Kentucky governor's race, lost in Mississippi, swept the board in Virginia. So the off-year election is pretty good for Democrats this year. On to this week. I hope that while we were all watching election returns, we also did some meal prepping because this is going to be quite a week. I didn't do any meal prepping. I was going to do that this weekend. I made a lot of Thai food that I hope that we can eat through the rest of the week. Oh, I thought you were talking about for Thanksgiving. No, I mean so that we can that we can eat through the rest of the week. Oh, I thought you're talking about for Thanksgiving.

No, I mean, so that we can have sustenance for the rest of this week. Oh, I thought you were talking about getting ready for Thanksgiving. That is a whole week away, Amara. A week and a half. I eat all my meals out of the NPR vending machine. Because we never leave. All right. So let's talk about why we will do sad solo desk lunch every day this week.

There are a bunch of people testifying in the impeachment inquiry this week. What are you guys looking for in these hearings? What do you expect you might see? One question about this week is how much is impeachment breaking through with Americans? The point of this is Democrats are theoretically trying to move the needle with undecided voters, break people off and bring them into the camp of impeaching the president. Will there be testimony this week? Will there be, as we often discuss, a moment on TV that can be turned into a clip and that will actually break through to people? That's what Chairman Adam Schiff and the Democrats really want. And according to a lot of the commentary about impeachment so far, they haven't had that yet. They've been very technical hearings, a weekend feel this is succeeding beyond their wildest dreams, meaning they were really worried there was going to be a backlash. And just the absence of a backlash to impeachment,

the fact that we're still at about 50 percent for, 47 or 48 percent against, even in the battleground states, that's what I'm told their polling shows, they're feeling fine. If nothing changes, if this is where it stays, they've dodged a bullet because this was a politically risky exercise for them. They did not go into this saying, whoa, this is going to change public opinion. There's going to be a groundswell for removing Donald Trump. They didn't think that. They went into this with a lot of trepidation. They felt they had to do this, especially the House. They felt if they don't do this, what's the point of being an Article 1 branch? You know, if you don't hold the president accountable for this, what are you going to hold him for? So I would say that even if there's not a groundswell for impeachment, even if there's not a viral moment, so far, the Democrats feel this is working out fine for them. So let's get into the detail of who America is going to hear from this week. There are a lot of names on this list. Phil, let's start with tomorrow.

Who's up on Tuesday? Tuesday is the first of three big days of impeachment testimony this week. Two panels, one in the morning, one with Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vindman, who's on the National Security Council, one with Jennifer Williams, who works for Vice President Mike Pence, and then an afternoon panel with Ambassador Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, and Tim Morrison, who's a former staffer on the National Security Council. We expect to hear a great deal of very interesting testimony from all of them.

And at least three of them were on the president's July 25th phone call. That's right. So one reason these panels are going to be so interesting is that Vindman, Morrison, and Williams all have been involved within the White House at the policy and at the working level with the Ukraine affair since the very beginning. And most importantly, they have firsthand knowledge. This is what Republicans have been complaining about the whole time. We're not hearing people with firsthand knowledge of the president's conversation with the Ukrainian president. These people do. Right. So like William Taylor, a lot of his

testimony about what Gordon Sondland had been saying and doing was actually information he had gotten from Tim Morrison. Right. And sometimes from Gordon Sondland. But the point is they didn't have direct contact with the president. So, Mara, up until this point, all of the witnesses have been people that Democrats wanted to testify. Now, two of the witnesses on this day are going to be people that Republicans requested. Right. Tim Morrison and Kurt Volker, Republicans considered them to be more friendly witnesses for their side of the story. It's not clear exactly why they think that. Tim Morrison did testify in closed session that he didn't hear anything illegal on the phone call.

That's kind of a low bar. But he certainly was concerned about it enough to want it to be put into some kind of a restricted access file so it wouldn't leak. He clearly thought there were some problems with it. Volker, he didn't see a problem with the president setting up this extra channel or this irregular channel to conduct his foreign policy. But it'll be really interesting to hear how Kurt Volker explains why it's okay when the president pursues a completely different foreign policy than the one that the bipartisan members of Congress have appropriated. Just very quickly, Alexander Vindman, he is someone who in his closed door testimony, he offered some blockbuster testimony for the Democrats. That's right. And according to his recollection, Zelensky and Trump used the word Burisma in their now famous July 25th phone call, which is significant because that's a code for the Burisma gas company in Ukraine, which employed Hunter

Biden on its board for some period of time. But that word did not appear in the transcript released by the White House. It included the phrase, the company, Zelensky saying, the company you alluded to. That's significant because if you dial your aperture back from the call, from the White House record of the call, this is about weeks and months worth of policymaking behind the scene. The president putting into place a channel so that he could talk with people in Ukraine and they could talk with him outside of that phone call in which he talks very specifically with Zelensky about the things they discussed on July 25th. Vindman's testimony about that was important in the closed door depositions. It's going to be important to hear in the open hearing on Tuesday. And Vindman also can testify about the call log, the rough call log, getting locked up, being put away. So that was

a lot, a lot of names, a lot of potential testimony. And because of that, we're actually going to delay the posting of tomorrow's podcast. The Tuesday podcast will probably not post right at five o'clock. We're going to wait for all of this testimony to wrap up so that you can hear everything that happened in the hearing. All right. Now on to Wednesday. Mara, the big name on the calendar for Wednesday is Gordon Sondland. He was a donor to the Trump inaugural and the ambassador to the European Union. He seems also to be the guy who has the most contact with the president along the way. Right. And he was one of the three amigos. There was Rick Perry, Kurt Volker, and him, who kind of conducted this irregular or shadow foreign policy. Now,

Gordon Sondland has already amended his original testimony to get it more in sync with all the other people who've testified. He remembered belatedly that in fact, he had told the Ukrainians that both a meeting with the president and the military aid were dependent on President Zelensky stepping up to the microphones and announcing investigations into the Bidens. In addition to that amendment, there are other things that Sondland has said that have been subsequently contradicted by other witnesses. So questions about Sondland. Is he facing some kind of perjury problem? Will he be a helpful witness for the president, for the Democrats, or will he just be unreliable? And then there's the other question of who's going to throw who under the bus. Donald Trump in October said that Gordon

Sondland was a great guy and a great American. In November, he said, I hardly know the gentleman. So he's a problematic witness for the Republicans. He's he's like, what do you call it? An X factor. You just don't know what's going to happen. And if you thought that was it for Wednesday, you are mistaken because we have a second panel of witnesses in the afternoon, two people from the Defense and State Department who are going to be important fact witnesses in this phase of the impeachment hearings. But Phil, they're like not as well known, obviously, than Gordon Sondland. That's right. One of them is Laura Cooper. She's the deputy assistant secretary whose portfolio includes Eastern Europe and Ukraine.

And another is David Hale, who's undersecretary of state for political affairs at the State Department. Important fact witnesses, but they're not going to be the same kind of magnitude as we heard Mara talking about with Gordon Sondland. All right. And then Thursday is Fiona Hill. She is formerly the top Russia specialist at the National Security Council. Any sense? I mean, is she batting cleanup here? is that the idea? She had a front row seat at meetings between Sondland and a Ukrainian delegation who came to the White House and John Bolton, who was the national security advisor, fired exactly at the same time as the aid was being released after the whistleblower report had been made public. And there was an uproar on Capitol Hill, a bipartisan one, to get that aid released. But Fiona Hill can talk about what John Bolton said and did in his efforts to get that aid released. And of course, she's already testified behind closed doors that Bolton told her to go talk to the lawyers, talk to John Eisenberg, the NSC lawyer, and tell him that John Bolton didn't want anything to do with the, quote, drug deal that Gordon Sondland and Mick Mulvaney were cooking up.

OK, so that gets us through to Thursday. There is nothing on the calendar for Friday at this point. Does that mean that this is all done then? Probably not. That's a great question. Because there's some closed door depositions that the Democrats would really like to get before the cameras. Chairman Adam Schiff of the Intelligence Committee has been asked whether this week would close out open hearings for the fact finding phase, as they call it, of the impeachment. And he hasn't been categorical about that. So we don't know definitively whether this week is going to close the door.

All right. Well, Phil, we are going to let you finish prepping for the rest of the week, reading up all those transcripts, and we're going to let you go for now. Thanks, Phil. Thank you. And we are going to take a quick break when we get back. 2020. Support for NPR and the following message come from the American Beverage Association. Not all plastic is the same. Their members are making plastic bottles and caps that are 100% recyclable and made to be remade.

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And we're back. And we've got Scott here. Hey, Scott Detrow. How's it going? Pretty good. You look like someone who wasn't prepared to say how they were. That might be true. We've got some exciting news for people who can't get enough of our podcast. On Wednesday, there will be two NPR Politics podcasts. Yes, you have the early show. I have the late show. I will be doing the podcast about that other story that's happening, which is the 2020 presidential election, because

the latest debate is this Wednesday in Atlanta. Scott, quick rundown. So I think the thing to flag is who's not going to be there. The one candidate who's been on the stage before but did not make the cut this time is former HUD Secretary Julian Castro. We have one and a half new candidates in the race. Neither of them will be there. Deval Patrick got into the race too late to qualify. There's no signs that he's anywhere near qualifying in terms of polls or fundraisers. And former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has not yet actually said he's running for president. He's just getting on the ballot in a few states.

So clearly he will not be there as well. And even if he was in, he's disqualified himself for the debates because he's not going to be raising money. That's a good point. Yeah, because the Democratic National Committee, who is setting the rules for who gets in, says you have to raise money from real people and not just yourself. Though I guess technically he's a real person. So going into this debate, I think a lot of eyes might be on South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. There's this new poll out of Iowa that shows him sitting at 25 percent. That is the top of the poll ahead of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie

Sanders and Joe Biden. Ten points ahead of the three of them. That was a huge deal for Pete Buttigieg. And this is the poll that is the most important poll in Iowa. The Des Moines Register conducts it. It is always the most accurate poll out there. A couple other numbers that the Register flagged in its story that I think are worth pointing out in terms of how well Pete Buttigieg is doing in Iowa. 68% of respondents say he's their first, second, or actively considering choice. He had a 72% favorability rating in this poll.

Do you know what his favorability rating was in March? No. 17%. And most of them had no idea who he was. Exactly. He's done very well for himself, and he is now the frontrunner in Iowa and among the frontrunners of the race. And I think that puts him in a much different position. Last debate, he was the one throwing rhetorical punches at Elizabeth Warren, specifically on the lack of details in her health care plan. I think he is now at the point where he might be the person getting those debate punches thrown at him. Which we've seen every time when Joe Biden was the leader, people attacked him in the debates. Then Elizabeth Warren rose to the top of the field and she got a lot of flack. Now it's going to be Pete Buttigieg's turn. And he is the candidate that really annoys the other candidates. We've heard Amy Klobuchar say, hey, if I was the mayor of a town of 100,000 people and a woman, I don't think I'd be getting

the kind of buzz or reception that Mayor Pete does. In some ways, this race reminds me of 2012 on the Republican side, where it seemed like every month there was like a new candidate riding the escalator up and then they'd go. Well, that's something that a few other campaigns that point out about Buttigieg. He has had a very good streak. He has a ton of money. He is using that money to air a lot of commercials in Iowa, really introducing himself to voters or caucus goers there. The question is, if you're someone like Pete Buttigieg, an unconventional candidate, and certainly the mayor of the fourth largest city in Indiana, who will be the youngest president ever, counts as unconventional, is mid-November too early?

I guess we'll have a good answer to that question initially, how he does being the center of the critiques this week. And I think you can expect a few different lines of criticism. One, the fact that he isn't qualified to be president, though he could point out, hey, I've got more experience than the guy who currently is president, who you don't think is doing a good job. And he does that all the time. He does that all the time. Two, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren might critique him on his health care plan, saying it doesn't go far enough, though I think we're going to talk next about how Elizabeth Warren's really been seeing problems with her embrace of Medicare for all. And I think the third thing, though, I think it would be tricky to make that point on a debate stage, is he's doing very well in Iowa. He's doing pretty well in New Hampshire.

He's not doing – He's not moving the needle in New Hampshire. He was positioning himself to be the centrist alternative to Warren and Sanders should Biden stumble. Now, Biden has slipped. He hasn't totally collapsed. But now Pete Buttigieg is kind of like the dog that caught the car. What's he going to do with it? Scott, you brought up this Elizabeth Warren Medicare for all issue. Buttigieg is somebody who highlighted at the last debate that she didn't have a plan to pay for Medicare for all. Well, then she came out with a plan, got some criticism. So then she came out with another plan to talk about the transition from the current system to Medicare for all. How is that registering? Are you expecting that to come up at the debate. Yeah, I think this latest Medicare for all plan from Warren is really worth spending a moment on because what she's essentially saying, this is a little boiled down, she's saying that she will start with something that's really like the public option plan, you know, and that's what she would do right away, creating Medicare type system that you

could buy into not eliminating private health insurance. Then she is saying in her third year as president, she will push for Medicare for all. I have never heard a candidate make a promise in my third year as president ever before in my life. You hear a lot of 100 days. You hear a lot of day one. You do not hear in my third year when I've possibly lost the Congress. But this is worth pointing out. You both cover the White House. It is so hard to get more than a handful of big priorities done. We've talked about this a lot. What big notable thing did Barack Obama get done legislatively in his third year? Zero. Exactly. Sandra. So she kept on saying, I'm with Bernie without putting out details of her own plan. Then the other candidate said, hey, you have a plan for everything, but you're not coming out

with how you're going to finance this. Well, part of her brand is that she has a plan for everything. And also part of her brand is, as she would say, ask me how I'm going to pay for this. She would tell her interviewers, you know, she wanted to show that she had a pay for for everything. Well, she tried to make the Bernie plan work. Turned out it's very expensive. You have to tax everything that moves except for middle class taxpayers because she's promised not to tax them. And what happened was there was a huge backlash against this inside the Democratic Party. People were waiting to see if she was going to take this opportunity to move to the center. Nope. She doubled down on something that is less popular among Democrats than the public option.

Warren, especially with this latest reversal again on Friday, has opened up a whole new line of attack. So the question is, does Joe Biden use this to bolster himself or does Cory Booker, Kamala Harris or Amy Klobuchar really try to reinsert themselves back in this race in a way they've increasingly faded from the center stage of the race to say, I am somebody who is a little bit more of the middle ground of the Democratic primary, not the middle ground of America, but riding that liberal moderate line of trying to build a coalition. All right, that is a wrap for today. The impeachment inquiry continues tomorrow with more hearings. And we will be back, as we said, later than usual to wrap up all four testimonies. And then on Wednesday, we will have two podcasts, one at 5 p.m. on the hearings that day, and one very late to break down everything that happened in the debate. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign.

I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.