The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, September 26 - Whistleblower Complaint Declassified

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

In a complaint released by the House intelligence committee, a whistleblower cites White House officials who say they were ordered to veer from protocol to protect "politically sensitive" information. Plus, the acting director for national intelligence testifies before Congress. This episode: political correspondent Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Tim Mak, 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

Hello, my name is Sloane and I'm 13. And I'm her little sister Adelaide. I'm 9. We just took our first plane ride from our home in Kansas City, Missouri to hear the beautiful, magical Walt Disney World and beautiful Orlando, Florida for some vacation and to celebrate our father's 45th birthday. This is his favorite podcast. Next week, we set sail on our first ever Disney cruise. This podcast was recorded at...

Man, this sounds like a lot of fun. Happy birthday to your dad. It is 2 o'clock Eastern on Thursday, September 26th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Okay, it's time to have some fun in the park. So here's the show. And it was somebody else's birthday this week,

though, Tam, you celebrated your birthday by going on more of an impeachment cruise than a Disney cruise. No, I did just book a Disney cruise this week. I'm so excited. I feel like I'm being held emotionally hostage by these timestamps. I'm already so tired. I'm getting so emotional. You've got a Disney cruise in your future. Life is a Disney cruise. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the so emotional. You've got a Disney cruise in your future. Life is a Disney cruise. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow.

I cover the campaign. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Tim Mack. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. So today, it's only two o'clock, but we have seen the whistleblower complaint be made public. We have seen the acting director of national intelligence testify in front of Congress.

And we have seen President Trump get very angry about all the things that have played out over the last week. Let's dig into all of it. Let's start with that whistleblower complaint. What did we learn from this document that we didn't know from the partial transcript that we read yesterday? Well, a few things really jumped out to me. Firstly, the whistleblower does not feel that he or she is alone. The whistleblower complaint said that there were numerous White House officials that were, quote unquote, deeply disturbed by this phone call that the president had with the president of Ukraine back in July. The whistleblower said essentially that they had basically viewed that request and that phone call as the president abusing his office for personal gain. So that's one big thing that kind of jumped out to me. This whistleblower does make clear that they have heard this from numerous people and that a lot of the information they have is not firsthand information.

That said, they also describe concern about the president of the United States sort of trying to extract things from the president of Ukraine, dangling a meeting in front of the president of Ukraine in exchange for, though not explicitly, demanding, wanting an investigation of the president's political rivals. Also wanting an investigation of the role of Ukraine in the 2016 presidential election. And while we knew about this July phone call, what this whistleblower complaint also outlines is this effort to kind of hide the fact that this phone call happened at all. The whistleblower complaint said that White House officials had, quote, locked down records of the phone call and that the transcript or the memo outlining that call was loaded onto a system usually used for covert action and intelligence efforts, not political transcripts of calls between world leaders. Did it say any reason as to why they tried to lock this down, what their motivations may have been, according to this whistleblower? According to the whistleblower, there was some concern among White House lawyers and other White House officials that something bad had happened on this call. Mara, what stood out to you?

Well, a couple of things stood out to me. First of all, that this effort, which the Democrats are now calling a cover up, to hide or to put the rough transcript into some kind of a more secretive file has happened before. This isn't the first time that a president's conversation with a foreign leader has been put in a place that would be harder to find. Also, this whistleblower complaint described the phone call pretty accurately. So it turns out- Because we now have the transcript of the phone call. And also, it put the efforts of Rudy Giuliani and the president to work with Ukrainian officials to try to get this investigation of the Bidens going. It put it in context, and it really painted a picture of how high a priority it was for the president to get this done. And it's worth saying right here that Rudy Giuliani, again, is not in any government capacity. He is acting in all of this as President Trump's personal lawyer.

So there is one paragraph here that I think says a lot. And I think I would just like to read it. It's talking about why they why White House officials were worried about this phone call in the first place. Here we go. The White House officials who told me this information were deeply disturbed by what had transpired in the phone call. They told me that there was already a discussion ongoing with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood in the officials retelling that they had witnessed the president abuse his office for personal gain. Tim, you were mentioning before that one thing that jumped out to you is just how

readable this document is. Can you take a step back and just describe what it looks like, how it reads, and why that matters? It reads like a letter you might write to a friend describing a conversation or series of, maybe that's not the best analogy. It's not a letter you wrote to a friend. But it's short. It's bullet points. It's a lot more readable than the Mueller report. Let's just put it that way. It's not hundreds of pages. Anyone listening to this right now can go online and read this. It's nine pages, including an appendix, and see for themselves. And also, very similarly, the memo or the quote quote unquote, transcript of the conversation that the president had with the leader of Ukraine.

That's also quite short. It's about nine pages as well. You could pretty much wrap the entire kind of primary source documents that we're all talking about in about 20 minutes. You could probably read it. Don't say it that way. It makes it sound like they don't need to listen to the podcast. Look, in other words, if the Mueller report was too intimidating and complicating and just too thick and murky to get through, this is easy to digest and understand. How is the White House responding to today's development, to the release of this whistleblower complaint? Well, the White House is making the same kinds of arguments that you heard them make yesterday. First of all, they're focusing on the fact that this was secondhand. The whistleblower collected this information from others. They are focusing on the allegations around what other people did with Ukraine, Democratic senators.

I don't think the White House has come up with a good kind of 360 degree political defense yet. And President Trump himself weighed in. You will hear the sound of Air Force One behind him. I think that we could use the phrase lashing out possibly to describe how he's responding today. My call was perfect. The president yesterday of Ukraine said there was no pressure put on him whatsoever, none whatsoever. And he said it loud and clear for the press. What these guys are doing, Democrats are doing to this country is a disgrace and it shouldn't be allowed. He later says maybe we can go to court to stop them.

Big difference from the president who claimed impeachment would be a great thing for him politically. But fundamentally, I think just to sum it up, right, that here's what the whistleblower complaint does. The whistleblower accurately describes the call, which speaks to his or her credibility. It outlines an attempt to hide the record of that call. And it suggests that this is not an isolated incident. There are many or multiple cases, at least, in which the president or the White House has tried to hide conversations like this. It lays out a lot of breadcrumbs for investigators. There are a lot of names of people who had meetings who presumably congressional investigators

are going to want to talk to. So that's all the new facts that we know as of now, timestamp o'clock. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about how this is playing out politically today and what we learned from that testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee from the director of national intelligence. Alex Wagner and Mark McKinnon as they give you an inside take on the wildest political show on earth. Don't miss new episodes of The Circus, Sundays only on Showtime. Go to Showtime.com and enter the code NPR to receive a free one-month trial of Showtime. This is for new subscribers only and the offer expires 10-13-2019. Support also comes from Google. From Connecticut

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Latin America to show you the fascinating, strange, and compelling stories of the region. Subscribe and listen every Tuesday. All right, we're back. So Tim, very shortly after the whistleblower complaint was made public, the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, played a key role in whether or not that report would go to Congress, showed up before Congress. How'd it go? Well, Joseph Maguire is a career military official, not a career intelligence professional per se, right? Now, he doesn't have a long, long history in intelligence. He's largely been a military official through his career, through decades of public service. And it's only more recently during the Trump administration that he entered

a intelligence-focused role. He was the head of the National Counterterrorism Center for a couple years before entering this particular role. And he's only been in this office for just over a month, and he was just handed this storm that surrounded him completely. And he's still acting. And he's still the acting director of national intelligence, has not been confirmed by the Senate, has not been nominated to be confirmed by the Senate. So he is almost a placeholder who has to deal with this crisis right now. And the big question that's being put to him is the law says that if there is a whistleblower complaint that is urgent, that should be handed over to Congress, in particular, the intelligence committees.

And he did not immediately hand over the whistleblower complaint to the intelligence committees. Instead, he consulted with the White House to the president, there were issues of executive privilege involved. And thus he had to talk to the White House about those issues of privilege. Mara, I'm wondering what you think about this politically, because a lot of the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee spent the day really trying to blast McGuire, paint him as a bad actor. This is after they've gotten the report. And he seemed to be saying, I was trying to do what I could to work with you. I felt like today didn't necessarily add a whole lot to this drama. I think it didn't change the overall politics of it, which is that the Democratic House is going forward with this. There's going to be an inquiry.

All assumptions are that there will be a vote on impeachment at some point on some kind of articles impeachment. We don't know what those articles are. Maybe there'll only be about this. What was the range of response from from key Republicans in both the Senate and the House after the report came out this morning? Privately, really disturbing, really bad, doesn't look good. Publicly, this is inappropriate, but not impeachable. Or this is all you've got, you know, not enough. And Republican Mike Turner of Ohio, he's on the House Intelligence Committee. And while a lot of Republicans were closing ranks around the president, he was critical. I want to say to the president, this is not OK. It isn't that conversation is not OK.

And I think it's disappointing to the American public when they read the transcript. But I've also seen a lot of Republicans, including, importantly, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader who sets the agenda for Republicans there, saying, arguing it's Democrats who are overreaching. Democrats have been desperate to impeach the president all along and have been clinging to a reason.

And a lot of the argument from that camp boils down to this isn't enough. There was no direct quid pro quo that we talked at length yesterday about the I want to ask you to do us a favor, though, you know. The thing that strikes me, though, is that nobody knows what the political endgame is. A lot of Democrats who think the president should be impeached say this could be a terrible thing for us politically. It's only the people in super safe blue districts who think this is going to be

great. We're going to get all these moderate Republicans on the record defending Trump. The most Democrats I talk to say this is a big political risk, but they feel they have to do it anyway because this is a clear cut abuse of power. They have to hold the president accountable. If they don't do it, they are emasculating their Article One institution. But nobody really knows what the political endgame is. And, Tam, Congress is about to break for two weeks and go home. So a lot of these members, especially the Democrats in the swing districts, are going to hear a lot from their constituents. And just remember how recently this became a thing, right? Like, just a week ago, no one was talking about Ukraine.

Nobody was talking about a whistleblower. No one was talking about impeachment because Nancy Pelosi had pretty much tamped that down. Funny you both said that. I wanted to end this segment this way. I want to play a clip from us talking exactly a week ago in our last weekly roundup. Sue, a lot of House Democrats might have been eager to turn the page to something else this week. They absolutely were. I think there is so much eagerness inside the Democratic caucus to talk about something that is not impeachment. And that's, of course, when Democrats were holding hearings, trying to poke in the Mueller report and see if there was any forward movement. And not getting anywhere. Not getting any. But you know

what they say on the Internet? Life comes at you fast. And as Nancy Pelosi says over and over again, she likes to quote Tom Paine, the times have found us. The thing I don't know yet, and I guess many of these members of Congress are going to find out when they go home to their districts, is has this sunk in? Is this dominating our lives, dominating our podcast, but not really yet outside of Washington in the bloodstream? Or is this a huge thing? Well, we don't have a lot of polling, obviously, since this came out. We're going to have polling from NPR in a couple hours. That's pretty great. The two pollsters, big respected pollsters that I've spoken to, feel that this is not going to move what they call

malleable voters, those 20% of voters who are persuadable. It's going to harden views on both sides, people who want the president defeated, people who are total fans of Donald Trump. They're going to be even more energized and stuck in their corners. But we're waiting to see real data on that. One Democratic pollster said to me that the problem with this is that people are sick of Russia. They very well might see Ukraine as kind of Russia Junior. And they don't want to hear about this anymore. They want it over with. And they could be mad at Democrats for bringing it all up again. All right, real quick, what comes next? Do we even know what comes next? Look, there's this inspector general report that's still out there that may be provided.

And there's also this whistleblower and whether he or she is a compelling witness for the intelligence committees and what he or she may be able to tell about this evolving scandal to Congress. All right. We're going to podcast on all of this tomorrow. We're going to take a quick break, though, and come back with Can't Let It Go because even though it might not feel like it,

it is Thursday. Hey, it's Guy Raz here from How I Built This on NPR. And on our latest episode, we tell the story of how Andy Puttycomb and Rich Pearson

turned Andy's experience as a Buddhist monk into a guided meditation app. It's called Headspace and it's now used by millions of people around the world. New episodes come out every Monday. Listen and subscribe right now.

All right, we are back and we will end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, the part of the show where we talk about the things that happened this week that we cannot stop thinking about politics or impeachment or otherwise. I will go first. I think I also have another serious kind of... You better not make me cry again. Well, at a moment very early in the morning when I was on Morning Edition where I just finished talking to the hosts about all of the ways with impeachment. And then the very next story was a report saying that the oceans are warming at an alarming rate.

We now have ocean heat waves. And I was just like, does any of this even matter, you know, with the way that climate change is becoming more and more serious? And I think a thing that really encapsulated that and really brought its symbolic value and got a lot of people's attention was the Swedish girl Greta Thunberg, who's become a high-profile climate activist, has been in the United States the last few weeks. She was here in Washington. I think she actually sailed across the ocean in order to not have a carbon footprint to come to the United States.

She was speaking at the United Nations and really gave just this damning speech to world leaders. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? And then, of course, it's very hard to have a light note of all of that. But there was this moment of Trump walking by her at the United Nations and the video of her just giving him this very, very angry look of like, kind of encapsulating how she talked right there as he walked by.

He did not seem to notice her. But then he tweeted about her and said she's like very sarcastic, a very sarcastic tweet. And and now that is her Twitter bio, whatever she whatever he tweeted about her, like a nice girl with a promising future or something. That's now her her Twitter bio. Tam, what about you? Well, while we are talking about the UN General Assembly, UNGA, UNGA, as they say, all the world leaders come.

They give a speech in front of this like green marble background. President Trump gave a speech. Many people gave speeches. Also, Boris Johnson gave a speech and and his speech was sort of a rage against the machines, if you will. You may keep your secrets from your friends, from your parents, your children, your doctor, even your personal trainer. But it takes real effort to conceal your thoughts from Google. And if that is true today, in future, there may be nowhere to hide. In future, voice connectivity will be in every room

and almost every object. Your mattress will monitor your nightmares. Your fridge will beep for more cheese. Your fridge will beep for more cheese. What was the point? Yes, what was the point? I don't know. But our beds are coming for us.

Are there smart mattresses that I'm unaware of? I think there are. Yes, they are. Not just the sleep number. Everything can be smart. Your fan can be smart. Your light switch can be smart. Your toaster can be smart.

I draw the Luddite line when it comes to smart appliances in my house. I will not let Alexa in my house. I don't want to smart anything. You realize that when you just said Alexa, my house just went, what do you want? There's so many surveillance opportunities. Why import another one? Tim, what about you? So our can't let it go this week is the thing that we can't stop talking about, impeachment or otherwise, right?

And so mine is about impeachment or otherwise, right? And so mine is about impeachment. So if you had Ashton Kutcher in your impeachment bingo card, here I am to check it off. Ashton Kutcher met with the Ukrainian president as all of this was underway. Ashton Kutcher, the actor. From That 70s Show, among other things. From That 70s Show. His current wife, a fellow That 70s Show alumni, Mila Kunis, is a Ukrainian.

So he's not with Demi Moore anymore? No, that's old news. Old news, Scott. Sorry. And he used this opportunity, Ashton Kutcher did, to press for the president's impeachment and kind of hold forth on his views on the president of Ukraine. He said that the president of Ukraine is committed to eliminating corruption and he's really committed to ending the war with Russia

and he's grateful for the U.S. financial aid to them. But he kind of used that as a jumping off point in a kind of news cycle that is obsessed right now with Ukraine to press for the impeachment of President Trump. Did he talk to Zelensky about whether he felt pressured by President Trump? I think not. Right. Sadly, I don't think at that point we had known all the things that we knew now. But here's what Kutcher said, that if the president had used financial aid to leverage Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, he should be impeached. But if he didn't use it as leverage and simply encouraged the president of Ukraine to investigate Biden, he should still be impeached. Well, he's in line with House Democrats, many of them.

So now you know where Ashton Kutcher is on impeachment. You can add that to your personal impeachment track. Mara, what about you? Mine is just a nice little Rudy Giuliani tidbit. He is the character that keeps on popping up in the story everywhere. And he was on Fox News, and we might even have the clip. He says, I'm a pretty good lawyer, just a country lawyer. I never talked to a Ukrainian official until the State Department called me and asked me to do it.

And then I reported every conversation back to them. And Laura, I'm a pretty good lawyer, just a country lawyer. Which I loved because saying I'm just a country lawyer is usually what someone says, with the thick Southern accent, to fool their opponents into thinking that they're not so smart when actually they're smart as a whip. But Rudy Giuliani is born and bred in New York and was the mayor of New York City and is not a country lawyer by any stretch of the imagination. He is a city mouse. He's a city mouse. He went to New York University, which is one of the most expensive law schools in this nation. Luckily for Rudy Giuliani and for the playing of this song,

the New York Yankees are about to embark on a playoff run that should last all of the next month. Maybe they will still be playing baseball before there is a House vote. Are we ending the show with this? Oh, yeah. All right. That is a wrap for today. As we said earlier, we will be back in your feeds tomorrow. So all the news that happens between now and then, we will talk about it tomorrow.

I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Tim Mack. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.