The NPR Politics Podcast - Speaker Nancy Pelosi Announces Formal Impeachment Inquiry Into President Trump

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

After months of expressing caution about a push for impeachment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi launched a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump Tuesday. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, Congressional correspondent Susan Davis, White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and senior political editor/correspondent Domenico Montanaro. 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

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Frank Ordonez and I also cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And it is 6.50 p.m. on Tuesday, September 24th. And we are here because not long ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi walked out of a meeting with House Democrats and announced that she now supports an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. This week, the president has admitted to asking the president of Ukraine to take actions which would benefit him politically. The actions of the Trump presidency revealed a dishonorable fact of the president's betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security,

and betrayal of the integrity of our elections. Therefore, today, I'm announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry. That seems big. This is a big deal, right? I mean, the fact of the matter is Nancy Pelosi has gone for so long being so cautious, trying to hold back the gates of progressive Democrats who've been bubbling over, trying to force Nancy Pelosi's hand to do this. And finally, that dam broke today and she got on board with this. And so you are up on the hill and it was like a wear flats day. It seems like it was

absolutely nuts. Yeah, a lot of running in the hallways today. I agree with Domenico. It's a major moment. It's a defining moment in the course of what's been happening in this Congress and the question of impeachment for the main reason that you can't bring articles of impeachment to the floor without the support of the speaker. Up until today, they did not have it. Pelosi made clear impeachment was a non-starter on her watch. It is now a starter. I do think it's important to note that not much has really substantively changed. She didn't call for a new select committee. She didn't call for a formal vote on the House floor. She is essentially just saying that thing that Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the judiciary, has been calling an impeachment inquiry all along. I now agree with him.

So that does not sound like the beginning of impeachment in the way that she made it sound like. I mean, it is certainly the start of a new chapter up here in that once this effort has the backing of the speaker, you know, they're cooking with gas. And the chairman that we spoke to coming out of this meeting said they also made clear that the speaker and all of them aligned want to move with haste. Nadler told Democrats inside that room that he wanted to move fast and have a decision on this. There's a lot of things happening in real time this week, and we might get some answers really soon to this question of will they move forward with impeachment? I mean, look, the fact is, though, once you say the words impeachment, that's a totally different environment on Capitol Hill and in Washington. I mean, it's a political earthquake in D.C. once you start rolling that

ball down the hill. The fact is, there's only been three presidents before this who have faced impeachment proceedings, and one of those presidents resigned so he wouldn't be impeached ultimately. This puts everything else under the cloud of impeachment. Right. And Richard Nixon resigned before a vote, but certainly not before hearings and proceedings and an inquiry. So I think that before we get much further down this road, we need to talk about how we got here. So yesterday we did a podcast that talked about how all this started. But let me take a deep breath and try to summarize. So there is a whistleblower complaint that the Trump administration is refusing to hand over to Congress. And that is reportedly about a call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine back in July.

Now, we know that shortly before that call, President Trump blocked military aid from being delivered to Ukraine. And on the call, Trump has said that he discussed corruption and Vice President Joe Biden. Trump has made no secret of his desire to have Ukraine investigate Biden and his son, though there's no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens. And it's not clear whether on the call Trump made it explicit, Trump says he didn't, that that the funding for Ukraine would be tied somehow to investigations into the Bidens. All right, Franco, you were in New York with the president. He has talked about this a lot today. He has talked about it so much. He has answered so many questions. And he's also, you know, continued to push this line, trying to deflect responsibility from himself over to the Bidens. It's been fascinating to watch because he also has been

kind of changing his story. Just yesterday, when I was with the president at the UN, he was talking about the reasons for this investigation had to do with his concerns about corruption in Ukraine. But today, it's completely different. It's about foreign aid and other countries not providing enough. I was actually talking with an ambassador today as well about that who said it just doesn't add up because Europe actually provides a lot of foreign aid to Ukraine and Europe also through NATO provides a lot of defense spending as well. So what we're saying here is President Trump held this funding for a long time, for something like 10 weeks from going to Ukraine. This money was needed by Ukraine as part of its defense against Russian aggression. And President Trump at first was like, no, I didn't give them the money because of corruption.

And then today he said, no, I didn't give them the money because of corruption. And then today, he said, no, I didn't give them the money because I wanted other countries to give them the money. That's right. He continues to change his tune. And you know, look, it's not that surprising. We've seen these type of kind of evolving statements from the president several times before when he's kind of in a situation under scrutiny for things that he has done or said. And like some of those earlier instances, such as the Russian investigation, he's also kind of falling on, you know, tried and true kind of narratives and statements. We heard today, for example, he's using a lot of the term witch hunt and presidential harassment. I've heard those words before about Russia.

And so, like, here's a question, Domenico. What is different? There were months of a Mueller investigation. There was a Mueller report. There was Mueller testimony. And Nancy Pelosi never said, I support an impeachment inquiry. I mean, this controversy has been a controversy for less than a week. And now she's saying, I support an impeachment inquiry. Straws add this controversy has been a controversy for less than a week. And now she's saying, I support an impeachment inquiry.

Straws add up before they break a camel's back. This is the straw that broke the camel's back. And the fact of the matter is, this is different. She even noted today that the difference here is that this is easy to understand. I mean, everybody gets making a phone call, someone saying, hey, you know, I wish you could investigate this person who is happens to be a political rival. You know, this is the president asking for foreign intervention from another country into the American elections, if that's what the allegations prove to actually be, as has been reported by The Wall Street Journal and others. You know, if that's the case, that is different. And it's very understandable.

It's easily explainable. It's why so many people said that the impeachment inquiry against Bill Clinton was easy to understand because he was lying. Right. And he was on tape. And then he lied. It's so true. This is a bite-sized kind of morsel that people can really latch onto.

Well, and in the last 24 hours, President Trump has seemed to put a lot of emphasis on this idea of no quid pro quo. In one tweet, he said, no quid pro quo exclamation point. And he is saying that he's going to release tomorrow a transcript of his call with the president of Ukraine. And he says in that call, you will see no quid pro quo. In a way, it was like the president was trying to get out ahead of this announcement from Pelosi and and sort of lay the groundwork so that the public in theory would be disappointed or let down like like people were with the Mueller report in terms of how it ultimately was sort of spun out. Democrats are taking a political risk here, right? Because so much of

this call for impeachment is based on information we still don't have. We don't know what's in that transcript. We don't know what's in that whistleblower complaint. And neither do they. If the information in those documents doesn't reveal itself to back up this point, does it risk looking like they are in fact just rushing for impeachment or looking for any reason to impeach? That said, these allegations against the president and what he may have done were so serious that it also did for so many Democrats in the last 24 hours to just get off the sidelines and get in and say, this is too far. Even now is we have to come forward. And I would point to people like a lot of those vulnerable Democrats in freshmen, a lot of these vulnerable freshmen in swing districts who have wanted to stay far away from this issue. And they really triggered to their credit.

I mean, I think they will be seen as sort of the action forcing event here. And it started with a group of seven House Democrats in an op-ed in the Washington Post, including some interviewed on NPR today, coming forward and saying, if the president did this, that would meet their own personal threshold for impeachment. And these are freshmen that were involved in the national security apparatus, former CIA analysts, former military veterans, that I think gave other members of the caucus, and I think including the speaker, sort of a tipping point moment to say, if they're willing to take this political risk,

we are too. And they, politically speaking, they are the majority makers. Many of them are from districts that President Trump won in 2016. These are the most vulnerable Democrats come 2020 when they're up for reelection. And in some ways, like Pelosi had been trying to give them cover. And then they came out and said, we don't want your stinking. We don't want your stinking cover. Yeah, I mean, they ripped the they ripped the cover off. And the fact is, if she's trying to protect them, they're out there saying we don't need the protection.

I mean, one of the things that is so important about this, that Democrats are going to have to make this messaging campaign. And, you know, when it comes to quid pro quo, there were three Democratic House chairmen who put out this letter saying that that Ukraine is dependent on USAID and is under continued threat from Russia. ability to advance the president's personal political interests, whether or not the president expressly tied his request to a quid pro quo is the real problem. Now, they're going to have to sell that message to a whole lot of people who may not have been paying attention to all of this over the last few days. Yeah, I mean, this happened so fast that there are probably a lot of Americans who are hearing about this Ukraine thing for the first time because Nancy Pelosi says that it is her tipping point. It is her reason for pursuing an impeachment inquiry or for supporting an impeachment inquiry. Okay, we are going to talk about what comes next after a quick break. Support for this podcast and the following

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just want to get a little technical here, Sue. At the beginning of the podcast, you were saying that technically nothing has really changed here. So I guess, what comes next? Are these committees that we're investigating going to investigate more or differently? Or what changes? Investigate harder? I mean, that's the question here, right, is what substantively changes. And I think that's why you saw a couple of things. One, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy came out pretty swiftly after Pelosi made her comments and sort of made the point that nothing new is actually happening here. She cannot unilaterally decide we're in an impeachment inquiry.

What she said today made no difference of what's been going on. It's no different than what Nadler's been trying to do. And he has a point. I talked to another chairman, Richard Neal. He's the Ways and Means chairman. He's one of the six chairmen that Pelosi says is part of this umbrella impeachment inquiry. And he essentially said nothing fundamentally is that different, that the Judiciary Committee under Nadler still is the tip of the spear. And as you have heard Jerry Nadler say on many occasions, he does believe he is already actively in an impeachment inquiry. Well, the Judiciary Committee will continue, so we don't want to misinterpret what they've been doing right along. But I think that this gives added impetus based upon the speaker formally requesting an inquiry. The substantive difference that I've heard a couple Democrats say, people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat from New York, who's been a strong advocate for impeachment, and leaders of the progressive caucus like Pramila Jayapal, who's a Democrat from Washington, came out of the meeting saying, the real substantive change is that Democrats are

all on the same page now. You know, prior to today, the story had been Democrats divided over whether to go forward with impeachment. The fact that you now have them all saying it's a good idea and we need to investigate it certainly gives new energy, a new heft, a new meaning to what's already been taking place. So, Domenico, politically, we NPR and others have done a number of polls about public support for impeachment. And there's not a huge amount of support for impeachment in the broader public. So, you know, Democrats may agree with themselves in the House. But is that enough? Yeah, I mean, look, we had like 40 odd percent of people saying either continue investigations or go ahead and impeach the president. I think that's basically your impeachment cluster right there when you think about that question.

But we have to remember that impeachment has always been unpopular. We've talked about this in the podcast before, but when the impeachment proceedings first began, when it came to Richard Nixon, it was something like 19% in the Gallup poll said they supported impeachment. And the only time that it got above 50% for a majority was in the week that Nixon wound up resigning. And still, it was only at 57 percent in that week. So that's not all that high. You're always going to have people who are uncomfortable with this. Americans are traditionalists and they kind of want to see elections determine things rather than, you know, the House having to go through with an impeachment

proceeding. But that doesn't mean that they haven't done them before because they've always been unpopular. And while Speaker Pelosi was making her statement, President Trump, we know, was in executive time watching it on TV back at Trump Tower. And he was tweeting about it. His campaign also put out a statement. They are certainly, Franco, putting the most positive possible spin on this development. No, of course. I mean, they are using this and they're trying to turn this to their advantage. I mean, I was speaking with a senior administration official today who basically said that this is going to animate the base. And that's what Brad Parscale, Trump's campaign manager, said in a statement that Democrats can't beat President Trump on his

policies or his record so that they're going to try this impeachment strategy. And what it will do is only energize President Trump's supporters. And look, there is some there is some you know, that's a potential. This is something they've been planning for early on. They have used this in the past saying, like, look, if you go this route, we're going to be able to accuse Democrats of simply trying to attack the president while the president tries to lead and tries to do policies. Kind of look at them as I try to do work. This is the narrative. Although, I mean, here's the thing. The president's base is always fired up, right? Like we have learned this time and time again. There's nothing that's going to happen to turn the president's base. I think this is the question of this very

narrow part of the electorate, the sort of independent or undecided voter, how they absorb what's happening here and whether it tilts the needle towards the president because they see him as a victim of sort of a political campaign to get him out of office? Or do they substantively side with an inquiry that may or may not prove that a president has used the power of the office to solicit a foreign government to engage in an election? And I think that's a really risky bet that you're going to think that that undecided swing voter presented with that information, should it be proven to be true, is going to side with the president. I mean, impeachment at the very end of the day is still a bad thing to happen to a president. So, Sue, Franco talked about impeachment blocking the sun. What does this mean,

this rhetorical shift and this acceleration? What does this mean for all the other things Congress was maybe going to do, like gun legislation or the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement or prescription drug prices? Well, I think you'd have to have some level of confidence that those things were going to happen to begin with. Prescription drug legislation, you could put on that list as sort of the very short list of things that had glimmers of hope of getting done. There hasn't really been substantive process to that end to try and get those passed before Pelosi came out for impeachment. It's certainly not going to help that she is now out for impeachment. I think to the points that Franco and Domenico made that this will consume the White House as much as it consumes Capitol Hill. I think it is possible in theory for Congress to still cut deals with the president. It has happened

in the past under confrontational times between presidents and divided Congresses. I'm very skeptical that it could happen under this specific divided Washington. And we should know that the White House put out a statement tonight from Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham saying in part, House Democrats have, quote, destroyed any chances of legislative progress for the people of this country by continuing to focus their energy on partisan political attacks. So there you have it. So there you have it. The White House has declared all legislation dead.

Okay, so we are going to be podcasting a lot this week. We were already planning to be. What is on our list? There's a lot of news happening. The immediate what we're watching comes tomorrow, where President Trump has said he will release a transcript of the conversation in question with the Ukrainian president. We are looking at House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said that his committee is in contact with the lawyer for the whistleblower. And he has said today that

the committee could hear from the whistleblower as soon as this week. Over in the Senate, they voted unanimously on a resolution calling for the whistleblower complaint to be turned over to the Senate Intelligence Committee so they could review it. And the Intelligence Committee is also going to hear from the acting director of national intelligence on Thursday. So the next 72 hours could be pretty wild. And one other thing to note, President Trump is having a press conference tomorrow. So we will be back in your podcast feeds just as soon as there's news you need to know about, which there's going to be a lot of news you need to know about.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Franco Ordonez. I also cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.