The NPR Politics Podcast - The Impeachment Inquiry Public Hearings Begin Tomorrow: What You Need To Know

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

After weeks of closed-door depositions, Democrats are planning open hearings this week about the Ukraine affair. Here's where the story stands — and what's coming next. This episode: political correspondent Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and Congressional reporter Claudia Grisales. 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 Jen, and I'm recording this as I watch my cat chase around a laser pointer. This podcast was recorded at... It's 306 Eastern on Tuesday, November 12th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but my cat will probably still be fascinated by this thing. Okay, here's the show. I recently saw someone in the park with a dog in a laser pointer and the dog was chasing the laser pointer and it was amazing. I used a laser pointer to entertain my toddler the other day.

So it works for all species and ages across the board. Hey there, it's the Imperial Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress.. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress.

So tomorrow, impeachment. We've been talking about it for months, but tomorrow it moves to a new public phase, and that's open hearings. So what if anything's going to change? We will have soundbites. We will no longer have to read transcripts and talk about them. There will be people, fact witnesses, talking. And Claudia, the Democrats at least hope and pray and think

that these public hearings on TV, on your radio, everywhere could change some minds. Right. They're hoping finally they'll be able to boilerplate all of these complex storylines that have been delivered through thousands and thousands of page of transcripts into a simple, simple premise, which is the president pressured this foreign country to conduct this investigation on his behalf of a political opponent in exchange for U.S. military aid. So before we get into what we can expect to hear from tomorrow's two witnesses, Tam, let's just rewind and do a little bit of a reset of what we know so far and what this is all really about. It started with a whistleblower complaint from a whistleblower who remains anonymous, but the allegations in the complaint have largely been corroborated by testimony that

has happened behind closed doors, by the call log, the rough log of the July 25th phone call that President Trump released. So the core of this is that President Trump had a phone call with the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, and on that call pressured him, asked him, depends on who you ask, to investigate his rival, Joe Biden. And although the whistleblower does not draw a direct line between the aid being withheld and the president's request for investigations, what we do know is that the aid was being held up. $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine had been put on hold by President Trump himself. Pam, you had a very epic project. You went through the entire whistleblower's complaint and annotated all of these details with primary sources, correct? Right. So if you want to really jump down the rabbit hole and read through it, dear listeners, it's all there and a lot more than I can talk through now. So one big thing that we have seen, at least from reading the transcripts and seeing these people walk in and out of hallways, that we've learned from all of these witnesses, it's really broadened out that phone call to something that took place over months.

Conversations about withholding aid, conversations about not having a meeting set up at the White House until certain conditions are met. We're going to start hearing and seeing these people in person tomorrow. Let's start with William Taylor, who was the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine. And of all the closed door testimony, his is the one where when we first saw that opening statement, we all thought, whoa, this is a big deal. What can we expect to hear and see from Taylor tomorrow? So Taylor was the top diplomat in Ukraine, and he has described what has been a pressure campaign that was intended to achieve this investigation that President Trump wanted of the't tied to this engagement with Trump and continued assistance for the U.S. for Ukraine depended on whether Ukraine executed on this favor that the

president was asking for. And it's likely that Taylor is also going to spell out sort of the stakes, both for the United States as well as for Ukraine in having this funding held up. In his testimony, in his deposition testimony, he talked about going to the front lines and the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. And knowing at the time that he was there, that the funding was on hold, he said at the time, Ukraine didn't know or he didn't discuss it with Ukraine. But that is, you know, sort of the stakes of this. Also, he was the one who sent the text message that said, are we really telling the Ukrainians that we're holding up funding for a political favor? Right. Essentially saying in that testimony that that he thought Ukrainians would die without that military assistance in this ongoing pseudo war war in eastern Ukraine with Russia.

So what about George Kent? He's a top State Department official. He wears a bow tie. What else? What else do we expect from him? I know, very spiffy. So Kent's previous testimony described the alternate channel through which the Ukraine pressure campaign was happening. He kind of dubbed the three amigos. That's one part of when we started hearing about this. So that's like official channels of foreign policy and then the irregular. Yes, the irregular channel of policy. And on this irregular channel were what he called the three amigos that they were known as in these circles. And that was comprised of the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, the former special envoy to Ukraine,

Kurt Volker, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry. And coordinating with all of them, and who comes up again and again in Kent's testimony, is, of course, Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, who really seemed to be pressuring a lot of U.S. officials, in addition to Ukraine, to try and get Ukraine to commit to these investigations. Right. And Giuliani is a regular character in a lot of these depositions, and he is certainly going to come up in Kent's testimony. One thing that stood out to me from his deposition was that Kent talked about Rudy Giuliani trying to get a visa for a disgraced Ukrainian prosecutor and going to the White House

because the State Department wouldn't give him the visa. And this goes way back months ago, months before the phone call. So what are these hearings going to look like tomorrow? Because often the questions asked in the hearing are not the questions that you might necessarily want to see asked if you're trying to learn more facts. Often they're performative questions. They're designed to get on TV as opposed to learn more information. Is that going to happen tomorrow? I think this is going to have a different look than what our listeners are used to seeing because it will start out with this 90-minute round split between the parties.

Republicans will have 45 minutes. Democrats will have 45 minutes. Democrats could be led by Chairman Schiff, or they could be led by staff counsel in questioning the witnesses. And then for 45 minutes, Republicans will get their turn. And they've already made clear they have a counsel that will be asking questions on their behalf, a very frequent name that appeared in the transcripts who asked a lot of these questions on behalf of Republicans. So it's going to have a very singular focus, if you will. And then it will split into some questioning, maybe five minute questioning back and forth after that. But it definitely will have a different look than what folks are used to. So if people only tune in for the beginning

of the hearing, they are going to see something more focused and more linear, at least theoretically, in theory. Exactly. All right. We're going to talk a lot more about what Republicans are trying to get out of this hearing compared to what Republicans are trying to get out of this hearing compared to what Democrats are trying to get out of this hearing after we take a quick break. I'm Peter Sagal. Sure, you're enjoying this NPR podcast filled with important and useful information, but is it the most important and useful information? Like this.

The museum actually went and made a synthetic version of dinosaur breath. It's Axe body spray, isn't it? I believe so, yeah. Wait, wait, don't tell me from NPR. Listen now and share with your friends. Okay, we're back. So, Claudia, there is a lot of stuff happening tomorrow. This is going to be a very lengthy hearing.

NPR will be airing all of it in special coverage on the radio. But if you don't have time to listen to all of it like we do, what do you think the most important moment is going to be? I think for me, what I'll be looking for is those opening statements by Chairman Schiff, by the Republicans ranking member and the witnesses. We did get a little bit of a clue of what Chairman Schiff will say at the hearing from a Democrat working on the impeachment inquiry. They said he will highlight the stakes for the American people and the concerns that have arisen from all of this evidence they've gathered over thousands of pages of testimony. And in fact, NPR's Steve Inskeep from Morning Edition did an interview with Chairman Schiff, and he got into some of why they are going into this, even knowing

that it's likely that the Senate wouldn't convict. What compelled me to go down this road is the fact that no sooner had one investigation come to a close, no sooner had Bob Mueller testified about the president's first effort to solicit foreign help, but the president was at it again. And impeachment is not only a remedy to remove a president, it's also the most powerful sanction the House has. And if that deters further presidential misconduct, then it may provide some remedy even in the absence of a conviction in the Senate. Well, that's interesting to me because it seems like he's almost anticipating that, yeah, maybe you're not going to get two thirds of the Senate to vote to convict President Trump

at the end of all of this. But here's why it's still worth it from his point of view. Right. And if I am thinking about this from the perspective of President Trump, what Adam Schiff just said was, yeah, we didn't get him with Mueller. And so now we're going to try again with this. You can definitely see how the president could spin that comment as, well, they've just been out to get me all along. So what's going to happen tomorrow, like his political theater, right? And that is not to diminish its seriousness, but it has a goal of changing people's minds about how they see this. We've seen the polls shift a little bit, but it's still a mostly partisan view of the world. Let's end with this.

Claudia, what do we know that Republicans are going to try to do tomorrow? How are they going to try to move this in the direction that they want to see it go? Well, Republicans are really still focusing on that nothing wrong happened on this call. And they probably want to go there with witnesses in terms of drilling down. Their focus has been the quid pro quo. Either there was no quid pro quo or it just never happened. The Ukrainians didn't know that the aid was being held. And in the end, they got the aid and there was no Biden investigation announced.

So their intent is to highlight basically a sham of a process and that the president did nothing wrong. And they had been really criticizing the fact that this has happened behind closed doors. But of course, you can't make that criticism in a public hearing that that phase has ended. And that's one of the biggest things they've been talking about that's now gone. Right. Which is they are moving from the process argument to the substance argument. And their substance argument, as Claudia said, is essentially the president had a longstanding distrust of Ukraine and all of this was driven by that. And he didn't even get what he was asking for in the end. And Ukraine got the aid. So no harm, no foul. Move along. Which is kind of what the defense was of all that obstruction of justice stuff in

the Mueller report. Well, he said that, but nobody followed through. So it's OK. Yeah. What about the Democrats? So Democrats believe that tomorrow will be their first great opportunity to show this very simple argument that the president misused this U.S. military aid by dangling it as a carrot before the Ukrainians in exchange for this investigation into the Bidens and in terms of highlighting their role in the 2016 election. So they just really want to get down to a simple boilerplate. And they also want to put Republicans in a corner and say, do you want to defend the president or do you want to defend democracy? All right, so this party gets started at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning. NPR will be covering it live, gavel to gavel.

You can hear it on a radio, on a smart speaker, on the internet, wherever. Things I haven't even thought about yet that exist that play our radio stream. Tin cans with string and foil. But at the end of all that, say you don't have four or five hours to listen to this coverage. We will be back in your feeds tomorrow telling you what you need to know about what happened. All right.

Talk to you then. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. Thank you for listening

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