Today, Explained - Impeachment TV (Part 2 of 2)

Episode Date: November 20, 2019

The House impeachment inquiry just had its biggest day yet. Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains how things changed when Republicans called witnesses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to Act Two of today's circus, ladies and gentlemen. We are here to continue what the Democrats tell us is a serious, somber, and even prayerful process of attempting to overthrow a duly elected president. Thanks, Representative Nunes. Representative Prokop, who did Bindman and Williams open up for today? The afternoon witnesses were Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special representative to Ukraine, and Tim Morrison, the top National Security Council staffer handling Europe and Russia. He is a Bolton guy, and he was involved in some of these conversations with Ambassador Gordon Sondland and others about the potential withholding of aid to Ukraine in exchange for investigations. Kurt Volker, we will remember, was part of the Three Amigos who had a large role in Ukraine policy.

This is along with Gordon Sondland, who we'll hear from tomorrow, and Rick Perry, who we may never hear from again. Yeah, that's right. And Volker is big because he was actually the first witness to give closed-door testimony back in early October. And when he did that, he turned over a lot of text messages that he exchanged with Sondland, with Rudy Giuliani and with other people. They include, for instance, the famous message where Bill Taylor, the top diplomat in Ukraine, raised concerns that security assistance was being linked for help with a political campaign.

These are the texts that really prove the quid pro quo. Volker and others were telling the Ukrainians that a White House meeting depended on whether President Zelensky would agree to the investigations Trump wanted. And though these texts have been so useful for Democrats in sort of laying out this story, it was the Republicans who called on these two witnesses. Yeah. So as part of the rules around the impeachment inquiry, the Democrats said that the Republicans could nominate various possibilities for witnesses they wanted to call, except they had to be approved by the Democratic majority. So Republicans did want to call some

people like Hunter Biden, but the Democrats said, no, they don't have any relevant knowledge to the topic of whether Donald Trump committed impeachable acts. They did, however, suggest Volcker and Morrison and another witness, David Hale, who will be coming Wednesday. All of these three people testified behind closed doors already. And Republicans seem to have concluded that these weren't people who were going out of their way to try to, you know, really criticize Trump. Okay. So if the Republican strategy with these two witnesses, Volker and Morrison, was these guys make this look less bad. How did that strategy play out in the hearings today? It didn't play out very well for the Republicans because

they were happy to talk about the facts of what happened. And those facts generally do not make President Trump look good. Volker, in particular, contradicted talking point after talking point from the president's defenders in his sworn testimony. Okay, so what's the first one? So a lot of Trump's defenders have been saying that it was perfectly legitimate for Trump to ask the Ukrainians to investigate Biden because there was something really shady that was going on here involving Biden trying to push the Ukrainians to oust a top prosecutor. And Kurt Volker basically said, the accusation that Vice President Biden acted inappropriately did not seem at all credible to me. Volker explained that he was personally quite involved with this effort to push Ukraine

to announce these investigations that Trump wanted. But he said he made a distinction in his mind at the time. He viewed what he was doing as pushing for an investigation of Burisma, the natural gas company in Ukraine that Hunter Biden sat on the board of, but not an investigation into the Bidens. The problem for Trump's defenders is that Volker now says. In retrospect, I should have seen that connection differently. And had I done so, I would have raised my own objections. You know, he's essentially admitting that he was a little too credulous and that he should not have gone along with this. He should have realized what it was really about, that it wasn't just about fighting corruption

about some Ukrainian natural gas company. So drawing out this controversy about the Bidens and Burisma in Ukraine didn't really work for the Republicans. What's point two? So Volker actually changed some of his testimony from the first time around. There was this key meeting on July 10th with White House officials and Ukrainian officials. Volker had initially said that it was uneventful, that not much happened. But a bunch of other witnesses have testified that it was actually quite tense, that Gordon Sondland brought up investigations in front of the Ukrainians during the meeting. And Volker says that he now does recall this.

As I remember, the meeting was essentially over when Ambassador Sondland made a general comment about investigations. I think all of us thought it was inappropriate. The conversation did not continue, and the meeting concluded. So basically, Volker is no longer disputing the basic facts that investigations were brought up. OK, so a meeting that Volker didn't initially remember, he now remembers as an appropriate classic case. What was the first such witness. And he said that he didn't know about any connection between the Trump administration's holdup of nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine with Trump's demands for investigations. Now, he says— I've learned many things that I did not know at the time of the

events in question. He seems to be referring to the testimony of other witnesses and eventually also Ambassador Gordon Sondland, that Sondland did, in fact, tell the Ukrainians that they would likely only get their held up military aid if they committed to the investigations Trump wanted in a public statement. So you're saying that Kurt Volker, this witness that the Republicans called for, didn't dispel the idea of a quid pro quo. He actually reaffirmed it? Volker didn't really dispute that a quid pro quo was happening. But the guy who really confirmed that it was expressed was the guy sitting next to him, Tim Morrison. Morrison said that on September 1st, he saw Ambassador Sondland go and talk to one of Zelensky's top advisors and that Sondland then told him that the Ukrainians would have to have the prosecutor general make a statement with respect to the investigations as a condition of having the aid lifted.

This is Morrison viewed as a friendly witness by Republicans. Conservative credentials are unimpeachable. And he is saying, you know, I heard it from Gordon Sondland's own mouth. He tried to tie this military aid to the investigations and told the Ukrainians that specifically. All told, if this was the Republicans' big moment to make something go right for them in this impeachment inquiry, it doesn't sound like much did. Did anything go right? saying that he didn't really understand that investigating Burisma meant investigating Biden. You know, there are certain things that could be spun as perhaps helpful to Republicans, but they really didn't have much. If these are their best witnesses who are relevant to the actual events, then it looks like the underlying facts here are pretty bad for

the president. And with Sondland testifying tomorrow, things could potentially get worse. Yeah. So Sondland's testimony will be big. He is the only person on this witness list this week who is known to have had repeated personal interactions with President Trump on this topic. And his previous testimony was notably filled with statements that he couldn't recall this or that, especially when it came to President Trump. He had to update his initial sworn testimony once already to say that, oh, now I do recall telling the Ukrainians that aid was contingent on investigations. So the stakes are high for him. We'll have to see whether he ends up improving his memory even further, whether he stays a staunch Trump defender,

or whether even, you know, he pursues another path such as pleading the fifth. I look forward to talking about it with you tomorrow, Andrew. So do I. Representative Andrew Prokop covers politics here at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm, and this is Ukraine Explained. There's a website that you can go to. It's kiwico.com slash explained, where you can try out these projects, crates,

activities, learn about the world for one month or so for free. And it doesn't matter whether you're, you know, two, 20 or 73, you might have a great time. KiwiCo.com slash explained.