The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Administration Says It Won't Comply With Impeachment Inquiry

Episode Date: October 9, 2019

The White House will not participate in Congress' ongoing impeachment inquiry, stepping up a political and legal standoff between the executive and legislative branches of government. This episode: political correspondent Scott Detrow, 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 Eric from Los Angeles, California, and I'm getting ready to leave my first Yom Kippur services as a rabbi. This podcast was recorded at... It is 2.35 Eastern on Wednesday, October 9th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this podcast, but then that's why I listen religiously. I hope you have a gemar tov and a shana tova. Okay, here's the show. I like the pun on top of everything else. I do too. Lashana Tova. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Phil Ewing, National Security Editor. And I'm Mara Liason, National Political Correspondent. So yesterday, we spent a lot of time talking about how the White House seemed to be stiffing Congress when it came to cooperating with impeachment.

And now the White House has made that pretty, pretty clear. No wiggle room. Sending a letter that basically said, no, we're not going to participate in this. What it means is that there will be no cooperation between the White House and Congress. There will be no witnesses, no documents turned over. It's kind of a declaration of war against the impeachment inquiry. The letter said that the inquiry lacks any legitimate constitutional foundation. They accused the Democrats of trying to nullify the outcome of the democratic process by reversing the 2016 election and trying to influence the

upcoming 2020 election. And they also said in their most high-minded argument that if they did cooperate, it would do lasting damage to the executive branch, to their institution, and the separation of powers. And after the White House released this letter, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, issued her own response saying that she and Democrats will consider the lack of cooperation by the administration with these documents and witnesses if it continues to be evidence of obstruction, which could be its own article of impeachment if we reach that point in this process. Phil, the White House for a while now has been pretty dismissive of congressional oversight. I think that's probably an understatement. But this total non-cooperation, this seems like a shift even from how they approached the Russia investigations. It is with an asterisk. During the Russia investigation, the questions were being asked mostly by people within the administration, Justice Department and FBI investigators working

for the special counsel, Robert Mueller. The White House cooperated extensively with them. It made officials available. It made documents available. The president himself responded to questions in writing from Mueller. And there was some cooperation and interplay with Congress as well, although that eventually petered off. And there are actually legal cases working their way through the courts now between the House committees led by Democrats and the administration about some aspects of that investigation. The other distinction here is that the administration had been cooperating up to a point with this impeachment inquiry. When the speaker said she was going to go all the way to impeachment, the president made the whistleblower complaint available, which animated this whole thing. And also the White House's

account of his call with the president of Ukraine, which gave us a lot of the framework of the story. There were also a few witnesses that did come to Congress before this week. Now the news about this letter from the White House on Tuesday is that that's all going to stop. So Mara, does this mean that this really stops the flow of any new information to Congress, or do we think there could still be ways that information comes out? I'm thinking about that second whistleblower that we learned about over the weekend, even though we haven't learned many details about what additional information this new whistleblower has. Right. I think Congress can still get information. There could be more whistleblowers. There could be

former administration officials. We're not going to get any more administration officials or documents. And then this whole thing goes to the courts, and it could be delayed all the way till the election. The big question is, does this stop the impeachment inquiry? Or does Congress say, hey, we have enough information right now, we have enough evidence with the whistleblower complaint, the transcript of the call and the interviews and depositions we've done already that we can move forward with impeachment. Yeah. Phil, one point that the White House has been making a lot recently is that there was no formal vote by the House to begin this impeachment inquiry, and therefore it's less legitimate. How much does that bear out? The Constitution is very vague about what

the rules of the road are here. It says the House is responsible for bringing impeachment, and the Senate is responsible for the trial that results from an impeachment article in the House. But the Speaker is in charge of that. She controls the majority. She writes the rules. She can decide how she wants to proceed. The rules of the House don't require there to be a vote.

She has decided for her own reasons not to take one. And in point of fact, she can do what she wants because she has the votes and so she can run the table. The political calculation or argument being made by the White House is because there's precedent that contradicts what Pelosi is doing, that'll be helpful to them in the court of public opinion. And they also argue there's a fairness element here. Republicans say they should be able to have their own witnesses come in, issue their own subpoenas if necessary, and basically mount a defense of the president in the House,

although that's not exactly what's contemplated by impeachment because, again, it's an indictment. The House decides whether there's enough evidence for there to be a trial in the Senate, and then the Senate is where that trial takes place. Right. He could bring his own witnesses and make his own presentation in the Senate trial. Correct. And theoretically, if we did get to that point, there would be the opportunity for Republicans for the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, in the Senate to mount the vigorous defense of Trump that the White House says is called for here. We just kind of aren't there yet because this is still in the House. And Mara, one thing that you were pointing out was that the White House isn't even necessarily promising to change its tune if the House did hold that vote. That's right. On a background briefing call yesterday with the senior administration officials, they were asked over and over again, well, what if the House did take a vote? What if

they complied with some of the requests you're making? Would you cooperate then? They said, well, that's hypothetical, and we don't want to talk about that. So there's no guarantee that the White House would cooperate under any circumstances. What's interesting to me is that their whole argument is about process. They're not saying the president should not be impeached because it's perfectly okay to ask a foreign government to investigate your political rival. They're talking about process, about whether there's a vote, about whether the president can call his own witnesses. None of it is about the actual charges against the president. So Mara, for like three years now, you have repeatedly talked about

various moments being stress tests for democracy in all of this. How big of a deal is this letter, this promise to not cooperate at all with Congress in that lens? Well, I think it is a stress test for democratic institutions because it's a huge separation of powers battle. And both sides have been explaining their stances as something they have to do to preserve their institution. The Article One institution, Congress says, if we don't do this, we'll be undermining the power of Congress to be a check and balance on the executive branch, which is what the framers intended. The White House is saying if we cooperate, we'll be undermining the executive branch. And if the White House prevails here, then it will be established that Congress doesn't really have any authority or oversight over the executive branch.

So that's kind of the big battle here. But we also know that there's always politics and the White House is making a political calculation and they're willing to pay the price of being seen as perhaps having something to hide. And that's a good point, because if you go back to what we initially learned about all of this, I feel like almost every new piece of information that has come out has really made the situation look worse for the White House. Right. All right. We've got more to talk about, but we're going to take a quick break first. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, one of the hosts of On Point, the NPR show that takes you behind the headlines. We've done a deep dive series on education and all

episodes are available to binge now. Listen to On Point now on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we are back. And yesterday, we talked a lot about how Democrats have been warning that obstruction could lead to its own impeachment count. How much more likely do we think that is after this letter from the White House? The House Speaker responded to the President's letter by saying, look, if you don't cooperate and give us the witnesses and the information that we want, we reserve the right to consider that evidence that you, President Trump, and your administration are obstructing our ability to find out what we need to know to do our investigation. And the calculation being made by the president and the White House is,

let the Democrats impeach me. Let this go to the Senate. The president himself said, we'll take it to the Senate and we'll win. So the one thing I'm wondering about here is timing, because Congress can challenge the White House resisting subpoenas and things like that. But that takes time. And this is something that is on the clock because of that whole presidential election that's about to happen because of the fact that there's a year and some change left in the president's term. Is there enough time for this to go to the Supreme Court and back and still have an impeachment inquiry? Well, it may be not if you want to get this all wrapped up by the beginning of 2020 before anybody votes in a primary. We don't know if Democrats feel they are dependent on a resolution in the courts for this to go forward.

Maybe they feel he's obstructing. That's another article of impeachment. We have the information we need to move ahead now without waiting for a protracted court battle. We don't know. We've heard members of Congress talk about how expeditiously they want to get this over with by Christmas time or by the beginning of the next year. That's because presumably they don't want to be litigating this in 2020, as Scott, you said, in the teeth of the 2020 presidential election, where they want that to be the focus of their messaging. So Pelosi could wave this off on her own. She could pull the brakes and stop this and figure out some way to get it some other place. pay a price with her most liberal members. Republicans would make that the focus of attacks for weeks and months. But we've had abrupt stops and reversals in the Trump era so many times, it's very difficult to remember how little we remember them because each new thing comes along and totally obscures those past experiences. The government shutdowns for which Democrats

were responsible and then Republicans were responsible. The Russia investigation itself. The Syria situation that's taking place right now, we can't say today what is going to animate voters in a year from now, in October of 2020, as they get ready to make that decision if, in fact, we get to that point about electing another president. I can't, Phil is so right on that. I mean, we keep on forgetting that every two months we're in a completely different place, obsessed about a completely different thing. I don't know, this seems a lot bigger than a lot of those other things, though. Yes, this does seem bigger. But maybe there's some kind of a perverse

positive for the House in that the Senate will not remove the president, or at least at this point, nobody thinks they will, because then the vote to impeach the president in the House almost equals a censure. In other words, the House did its duty, conducted its oversight. They indicted the president. Then the president is acquitted. So therefore, he's not removed from office. Voters still get to make that decision for themselves. We saw three or so polls in the last 24 hours showing that support for this impeachment inquiry is above 50 percent to varying degrees. Support for impeachment itself is a little lower, but we've seen a big shift in public opinion over the last few weeks. How much more would it need to shift

before Senate Republicans are thinking, wait a second? It would need to shift a lot. You have to really pay careful attention to the question these polls are asking. Lots of support for an impeachment inquiry, much less support for removing the president from his office months before voters are supposed to get to decide that for themselves. And there's a safe place for Republicans in the Senate to land. We've already heard some Republicans land there, which is to say what the president did was wrong. But I'm not going to deny the voters in my state the right, the sacred right, to go to the ballot box and decide if he

should stay in office or not. All right, that is it for today. We will be back tomorrow. Until then, you can keep up with all the latest updates by going to NPR.org and listening to us on your local public radio station or the NPR One app. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Phil Ewing, national security editor. And I'm Mara Liason. Wait, my dog is barking. Buster. Come on, Buster. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And that's my dog, Buster.

Thank you for listening to the N Fair Politics podcast, Buster included.