The NPR Politics Podcast - Pelosi Says Impeachment Inquiry Shows That Trump Engaged In Bribery

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi believes that the impeachment inquiry currently underway has uncovered evidence that President Trump's actions amounted to bribery. In this episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, and editor & correspondent Ron Elving. 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

Hello, this is Nikita and Sameer. We are on our way from Purdue University to Nashville, Tennessee, with our seven-month-old Kabir on his first road trip. We are thankful for the daily NPR Politics podcast. It will keep us sane and connected to the world of politics. This podcast was recorded at 2.37 p.m. on Thursday, the 14th of November. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Okay, here's the show. I want baby pictures. And I wonder if maybe it also helps Kabir stay asleep. We're going to keep this podcast interesting.

We're going to help him go to sleep. How about that? Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Ron Helbing, editor correspondent. And I have a feeling that we are going to be hearing a certain word a lot in the coming days. We have certainly heard it a fair bit in the last couple of days. What word do you think that I am thinking about? Would it be bribery? It would be bribery. Speaker Nancy Pelosi used it at a press conference today. Yesterday you heard an appointment of the president speak in very unambiguous terms.

A courageous public servant. The devastating testimony corroborated evidence of bribery. And she was asked what that meant. So what was the bribe here? The bribe is to grant or withhold military assistance in return for a public statement of a fake investigation. All right, Ron, I know that you carry a pocket constitution with you. And I think you even have the impeachment section highlighted in your tattered pocket constitution. It happens to be right at the point where the little staples come in. All right. So the president, vice president and all civil officers of the United States

shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of, here we go, treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors, period. That's the end of Section 4. It's the end of Article 2 and you get nothing more. You know, the amazing thing is we have spent so much time talking about high crimes and misdemeanors. We have glossed over treason and bribery. But all of a sudden, Democrats are using the word bribery a lot more. Democrats are usually late to the branding game. Donald Trump is always first. This is his speciality, so to speak. And just like he repeated over and over again during the Mueller investigation, no collusion, no collusion, no collusion, even though collusion wasn't a crime and he wasn't being investigated for collusion. And Mueller said that. Now he keeps on saying,

no quid pro quo, no quid pro quo. Which is harder to say. Which is harder to say, but also most people don't know what it means. Nancy Pelosi is trying to use plain English here, as many Democrats have encouraged her to do for many weeks. When she says bribery, which is I'll give you something if you do something for me, extortion is another way to explain it, meaning unless you do something, I'm not going to give you your payment. But what we do know now is for a period of time between July 18th, one week before the phone call between President Trump and the President of Ukraine, and September 11th, when the aid finally went to Ukraine, the aid was frozen. And during that time, the president and his associates, Rudy Giuliani and a group of diplomats, spent a tremendous amount of effort to try to get the

Ukrainian president to announce that he was going to investigate two things, the 2016 election alleged interference by Ukraine, and more importantly, the Bidens, Hunter and Joe Biden. You know, that quid pro quo phrase is the kind of phrase that people who are not lawyers use to try to sound more like they're lawyers. Who wants to sound like, okay. And what it really means is, as just has been described, and I think most people could understand that, something is contingent on something else. You can't have it until you do this. I think everyone has been through that with their parents, with their peers,

with everybody they've ever had any sort of business with, and it's easily understood. And that's what we heard in the hearings this week. Precisely. What's really interesting about what happened yesterday is that Republicans went to great lengths to say that nothing happened. In the end, there was no investigation of Joe Biden, and the aid went to Ukraine. Democrats are trying to say attempted bribery or an attempted robbery is still a crime. Well, I think it's also important to point out that this was not something over which the president had complete discretion that he could just send this aid to Ukraine or not. This was

aid that had been debated and decided upon in a bipartisan fashion, largely driven by Senate Republicans who really wanted it to get there and a lot of other people in both parties, in both chambers. And it was in the budget and it was part of the budget that was finally approved last winter, and it was part of the appropriation that had been passed by the House and Senate, and that by that agreement between the chambers and the parties, this aid was flowing, and the president had not indicated that he was against it previously, but it wasn't happening. It wasn't happening. And nobody knew at that point exactly why it wasn't happening, but they knew that the aid was not getting to Ukraine. So is this focus on bribery as the charge? Is that a risky strategy for Democrats? Is that

likely to work? It's like a big, scary word. Well, it's easier for people to understand. Bribery or extortion is a pretty clear description of what the Democrats think Trump did. He froze the aid on July 18th, and then he proceeded through his own entreaties and Rudy Giuliani's and Gordon Sondland's to try to get the Ukrainians to open an investigation into Joe Biden. I mean, that's what they think people will understand. And even though it is not necessary in an impeachment proceeding for an actual crime to be committed- Like in the code. Like in the criminal code, because impeachment is a political act and the House of Representatives

decides what they believe are high crimes and misdemeanors, what they believe is the reason that a president should be impeached. It would strengthen their case if they could prove that an actual crime was committed. And that certainly is one of the reasons that you're hearing words like bribery or extortion, which are, in the real world, actual crimes, as is attempted bribery or any other kind of attempted crime. Those are real crimes. The Republicans are saying, hey, you know, it didn't happen. Regardless of the president's intent, the investigations didn't happen and the aid finally went. And that's why it's not worth impeaching him over this.

No harm, no foul. No harm, no foul. All right. We are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, Marie Yovanovitch is testifying tomorrow. We'll talk about what to expect. Saturday morning. Your week was long.

Your time is precious. But why not take 10 minutes to catch up on some of the biggest news stories with Up First, NPR's morning news podcast. I'm Scott Simon. And I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro, Up First, here at Weekday Mornings, and now every Saturday at 8 Eastern 2. And we're back, and we are going to talk about Marie Yovanovitch. She was the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine until she wasn't anymore. Who can talk us through her backstory? Maria Yovanovitch is a U.S. diplomat. She was the ambassador to Ukraine.

She was, in essence, collateral damage from this shadow foreign policy. There were no allegations that her firing was illegal or impeachable. The president can fire any diplomat he wants for no reason at all. But she was called home quite peremptorily. She was told by her superiors, you have to get on the next plane. She will testify about how she learned that the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and some of his associates were kind of on the warpath against her, and they did it publicly in many television appearances. And she was removed, she says, because she was an impediment. She believes

she was an impediment to their plans, both commercial and otherwise. Well, and George Kent, who was one of the State Department officials who testified yesterday, he told a little bit of her story. Over the course of 2018 and 2019, I became increasingly aware of an effort by Rudy Giuliani and others, including his associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to run a campaign to smear Ambassador Yovanovitch and other officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. And just a little note for our listeners who might be confused about Kiev. Kiev is the Russian pronunciation of that city. Kiev is the Ukrainian pronunciation, and the Ukrainians are very

proud of their own language and want that city pronounced that way, and that's why diplomats do that. And then by May, she was out. During the late spring and summer of 2019, I became alarmed as those efforts bore fruit. They led to the ouster of Ambassador Yovanovitch and hampered U.S. efforts to establish rapport with the New Zelensky administration in Ukraine. And of course, we know from the rough transcript, the partial transcript of the July 25th phone call that President Trump said that Ambassador Yovanovitch was bad news. Yeah. Did he call her a bad woman? Well, he said she was bad news and that she was going to be going through some things, whatever that might mean. But it implied that in some sense or another, she was in trouble and that she was going to be in some sense or another, you know, facing some sort of legal challenge or professional challenge of some sort.

What did happen, of course, was she was just removed from her post as ambassador because she had lost the confidence of the president, which is, of course, his prerogative. He can do that. But it was interesting the way he described her to his counterpart in Ukraine. So here's a question I have. Ron, you just said that firing an ambassador is totally the president's prerogative. So why are we hearing about this? Is she a part of the main plot here or is what happened to her a side note? I do think Mara's point about collateral damage pretty much goes to the heart of this.

She was not anyone's real problem except that she was in the way of what Rudy Giuliani and his associates were trying to perpetrate, what they were trying to do in Ukraine. And she had probably raised some questions and I think it's going to be clear from her testimony tomorrow that she had. She's pretty closely allied with civil society groups and others in Ukraine that were trying to crack down on corruption. She was supposedly, from all we can tell, on the right side of the question of the corruptness and the corruption that we had seen in Ukraine. But that was not the message that was getting back to President Trump. So she had lost his confidence. And that, of course, is what matters. So she was fired from her job as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in May. So she wasn't even involved when the phone call happened. That was William Taylor,

who we've talked about before. So what does she have to offer? What she has to offer is the Democrats want to put this whole thing in context. She can describe the shadow foreign policy that was being conducted. She can explain a little bit about what was happening in Ukraine. There are all sorts of charges and counter charges of which Ukrainian prosecutor was corrupt. The president and Ukraine have had a very complicated relationship for a long time. You know, one thing that occurs to me as you guys are talking is that she was the ambassador when Vice President Biden went to Ukraine and said that the prosecutor should be fired. So as much as Democrats have a lot of questions for her, Republicans are also going to have a lot of questions for her and want her to talk about

Biden. Yes, but she's the wrong witness for that. I think that's right. They will probably try to discredit her as a witness, as indeed they tried to do with the first two witnesses on the first day. All right. We are going to leave it there. We'll be back tomorrow. Until then, head to npr.org slash politics newsletter to subscribe to a weekly roundup of our best online analysis. It'll show up in your inbox every Saturday to let you know what happened that week and what it all means. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason,

national political correspondent. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.