The NPR Politics Podcast - Key Testimony In Impeachment Inquiry Released To The Public

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

Transcripts from four witnesses in the impeachment inquiry have been made public. The NPR Politics Podcast breaks down the key takeaways from the hundreds of pages of testimony. This episode: Congressional correspondent Susan Davis, national security editor Phil Ewing, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Ian from Cincinnati. The polls are open! This is Debbie Ubera from Chesapeake, Virginia, and I just finished voting. This is Lucas from New Albany, Indiana, and I just got done voting in my local municipal election. Hi, this is Rebecca from Virginia. My husband and I are on a small getaway without our children and unfortunately forgot to vote absentee, so we're driving an hour and a half home to vote. This is Morgan Faulkner, and I just got to the Aylit Firehouse, my polling precinct in King William County, Virginia, where I'm very pleasantly surprised to see a parking lot full of people

out to vote in the General Assembly and local elections. This podcast was recorded at... This podcast was recorded at... This podcast was recorded at... 3.02 p.m. on Tuesday, November 5th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. All right, here's the show. I love the sound of a voter on the first Tuesday in November. I like hearing from somebody from Cincinnati. That's where I grew up, listening to public

radio station WVXU. I like that they turned around and drove an hour and a half back to vote. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Phil Ewing, election security editor. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And it is election day in five states, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia. If you want to know more about the local and state elections going on, there is a podcast episode for that. There's an episode in your feed from last Wednesday. Go check it out.

News you can use. OK, so as many of our listeners are headed to the polls, we're here with some news. The impeachment inquiry has taken its public turn this week. The House Intelligence Committee has begun releasing the transcripts of the depositions taken behind closed doors. Phil, catch us up on who these people are. Democrats have been hearing from a number of witnesses, but it's all been taking place out of the public eye. Now we're beginning to get copies of the depositions they gave to House investigators in written form. These documents that run to hundreds and hundreds of pages.

On Monday, we got depositions from Michael McKinley, who was a senior advisor in the State Department, and Marie Yovanovitch, who was the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine until she was recalled earlier this year. And then on Tuesday, we got depositions from the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, and a former envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker. They're both key players in the big Ukraine affair. Okay, this is pretty dense. We're sifting through hundreds and hundreds of pages of transcripts. But I do think we have already seen some big takeaways from what we're learning here. Right,

Mara? Right. The biggest takeaway is that what we're reading in these transcripts, which is very granular and detailed, does not contradict in any way the public opening statements that we've seen, the whistleblower report. It actually just fleshes it out. So it looks like the big headline coming out of today's deposition dump, if we can use that term, comes from Gordon Sondland. No doubt. But not in the testimony he gave before Congress, in the update he gave to Congress after that testimony. That's right. Ambassador Sondland wanted to get right with

the committee, and he went in and made a supplemental declaration to make his testimony actually more in parallel with what other witnesses had said. Mara, what exactly did he tell Congress? Let's focus on some major highlights of these depositions. You know, one thing that was released was a supplement or an addendum to the original testimony by Ambassador Sondland. He wanted to revise and amend his remarks, so to speak. And that addition says, quote, By the beginning of September 2019, and in the absence of any credible explanation for the suspension of aid, I presume that the aid suspension had become linked to the proposed anti-corruption statement. The anti-corruption statement was what the president

of the United States wanted the president of Ukraine to say, which was he was opening an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. This footnote goes on to say, which was he was opening an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. This footnote goes on to say Ambassador Sondland acknowledged telling one of President Zelensky's advisors in Warsaw that, quote, resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we'd been discussing for many weeks. Remember, this is the guy who said no quid pro quo. Now he's saying yes, quid pro quo. One of the things that has stuck out to me in reading this is in Sondland's testimony, because I think it goes to the heart of the very question of impeachment, which Democrats are investigating whether the president used his office

for his own political gain over the interests of the country. And in Sondland's testimony, and which is corroborated in the Volcker testimony, there's a May 23rd meeting in the White House. And this is before that July 25th phone call, where the sort of kitchen cabinet is trying to encourage the president to do these things for Ukraine. And the president has many personally held suspicions about Ukraine's role in the 2016 election. And Sondland quotes the president telling them that, quote, Ukraine was trying to take him down, quote. And I think that that is a particularly damning statement for the president, because it does seem to suggest that even people in his inner circle saw him as personally vested in pressuring Ukraine to do something that would scratch a personal political itch of his own.

It also underscores the difference between the advice he was getting from the national security and State Department professionals and the advice that we understand from other accounts he was getting from his personal aides, including, according to some reports, his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and more recently, Rudy Giuliani. And Trump has these insiders telling him the Ukrainians are responsible for the DNC hack and they're out to get you and you need to pay them back. He doesn't believe his professional assistants, the diplomats and national security pros. He does believe his own guys. And that's what animated the whole Ukraine affair. And not just pay them back. It's maybe you can get something

out of them that will help you in the 2020 election. I mean, that's what this is about. Did he use his office to further his own political benefit and not the national security interests of the United States? Don't forget, it was the United States policy, congressionally appropriated military aid to help Ukraine defend itself against a hot war with Russia. Phil, what has stuck out to you? Now we kind of know how the story ended. We've been learning from press reports about these depositions, what the shape of this Ukraine affair was about. The president expecting these concessions we heard Mara talk about from the Ukrainians.

And now we know basically, according to one witness, why it didn't happen. Ambassador Volker, according to his deposition, said, for one thing, Ukrainians began to ask for the Americans to do more to get them to start these investigations that Trump wanted, including asking the U.S. Justice Department to ask their equivalent agency to open these investigations. And according to Volker, that never happened. We don't know why yet, but someone at the Justice Department either was never asked to do that

or never made the request of the Ukrainians. And because that didn't happen, the Ukrainians started to drag their feet. And they also didn't want to agree to a statement, a public statement by President Zelensky that committed investigations of the DNC cyber attack in 2016 and the family of former Vice President Joe Biden. We don't know why, but they were stuck on the details and they wound up not doing it. All right. We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, we're going to talk about what these testimonies mean for the ongoing impeachment investigation. This message comes from NPR sponsor CBSN, the live streaming video news channel from CBS News.

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So years later, why did the FBI stop watching him? That story on Embedded from NPR. And we're back. So is our understanding of the information in these transcripts, does it change any of the fundamental facts of the case? No. No. No. So that would seem to be a rather difficult place for the White House to be.

Mara, how is the White House responding to these releases? Well, today, the press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, released a statement saying that the transcripts that were released today show that there's even less evidence for this illegitimate impeachment. Ambassador Sondland, she quotes him saying he didn't know and still doesn't know when, why or by whom the aid was suspended. She also quotes Sondland saying he presumed there was a link to the aid, but can't identify any solid source for that assumption. So they're still arguing that there's no quid pro quo. So I think that defense from the White House is important. And it is something we are starting to see echoed from House Republicans, people like Mark Meadows of North Carolina, one of the president's top defenders, is they are pointing to what these people have testified, Volker and Sondland

specifically, saying what their testimony is, is hearsayay because they never heard it from the president directly. And I think that is going to be a central defense of Republicans is you also can impeach someone if none of them can testify to a direct action or directive from the president. Moreover, the White House has also blocked the National Security Council and Office of Management and budget officials who are involved with the technical turning of the knobs to turn off or turn on money for these programs from appearing for these depositions. And so in the case of those witnesses who might be able to speak directly to what they did inside their shop and who directed them to do it, that hasn't come before these investigators yet. Right. But remember, there is a two-track defense from the White House.

One, which you just heard today, is there was no quid pro quo and you can't prove it. The president did nothing wrong. But then there's another one where the president occasionally said this kind of it's the so what if I did defense where he tweeted false stories are being reported that a few Republican senators are saying that maybe a President Trump did do a quid pro quo. And then he says, but it doesn't matter. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not impeachable. Perhaps so. The president's supporters, both Republicans in the House and the Senate,

have aired a version of the defense that Maura just articulated. The president may have wanted to get something from the Ukrainians, but he stumbled in actually getting it. And because they didn't make this public announcement that Trump wanted, there's no crime, according to this view, because you have to actually get the pro for which you're exchanging the quid. And we'll see whether they stick by that publicly or whether they err towards something more like what Mara also described, where the facts of the case are out there. They're almost indisputable at this point, based on the evidence that we have. But the higher level articulation that's been offered by, among others, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio is maybe it's improper, maybe it's not, but it's not impeachable. It's within the president's power. And as the White House chief of staff has said, Mick Mulvaney, this is just kind of the way the game is played in terms of doing diplomacy. Isn't that the entire argument about the Mueller report, though?

Absolutely. The Mueller report was he wanted to obstruct justice, but he was prevented by people like Don McGahn or Corey Lewandowski or any number of people who didn't do the things he asked them to do, didn't go to the Justice Department and ask for Mueller to be fired. So in this case, the president did want Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. Absolutely. situation. And now you see all of these diplomats who tied themselves up in knots trying to satisfy the president, but also get the aid to Ukraine. He was prevented from doing the thing that he and Giuliani wanted to do, which is hold up the aid until the president of Ukraine stood up and said, I am opening an investigation into Joe Biden. And the interesting question that raises is, we've talked about it before on this podcast, is the real political dilemma here for the president and Republicans, or is it for Democrats? Because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House have voted to launch the impeachment inquiry. They've kind of rung the bell that they can't unring at this point. And there's more momentum because there's these depositions there, these witnesses coming out. We're moving toward what's been described as a new process with open hearings. But they can see the arithmetic in the Senate as well as the rest of us.

There are enough Republicans who, if we get to the point of a Senate trial, will probably support the president and permit him to keep his office. Will they go through with it and will they drive all the way and land this plane in the Senate? Or is there some way that they can wave off between now and then? The speaker has said that impeachment is not a foregone conclusion. The question is, is that the most important thing she said on the day of the vote, or was the most important thing their willingness to do it? And none of us knows the answer to that right now. I don't know whether she does either. We should note that the impeachment inquiry is

still trying to keep going behind closed doors. They have issued a number of subpoena requests for people to appear this week or requests to appear. They're not showing up. Multiple White House officials, the latest today, White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney has been asked to come up to Capitol Hill this week. These are all folks we do not expect to show up on Capitol Hill, either because they've said they won't or their lawyers have indicated they will not. All of that is indication that the private phase of the investigation is closing up shop. And the next question beyond these public releases of the depositions is we soon expect to have some public hearings. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress.

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