Today, Explained - The impeachment counternarrative

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

Listen as Vox’s Andrew Prokop meticulously debunks the White House talking points around the whistleblower scandal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. We spent four episodes last week covering the biggest story in the country, explaining the facts around the biggest story in the country. And the whole time we were doing that, the President of the United States, his pals at Fox News, and a few other loyalists have been telling the country an entirely different story. That Hillary Clinton and the Democrats cooperated with Ukrainians with the order coming directly from the White House in January of 2017 to dig up dirt on her political opponent, and they did.

The president is the whistleblower here. The president of the United States is the whistleblower. And this individual is a saboteur trying to undermine a democratically elected government. If they succeed, the America that we inherited will be unrecognizable. As we speak, what is happening? They are attempting to remove a duly elected president from office based on nothing but a manufactured crisis. Wow. Confusing, right? But thankfully, Andrew Prokop isn't confused. He's been covering the whistleblower scandal for Vox, and today on the show, he's going to clear up any confusion around the five major talking points the White House has been pushing.

Number one, that there was no quid pro quo. I didn't do it. There was no quid pro quo. Number two, that the whistleblower complaint was all just hearsay or secondhand information. The whistleblower who wasn't involved in conversation, who heard from a friend, who heard from a friend, who heard from a friend. Number three, that the real story is the Bidens supposedly being corrupt. Why is the media so obsessed with every single aspect of this investigation, but they don't want to uncover the potential corrupt dealings of Hunter Biden and his father?

Number four is that Adam Schiff made up quotes from Trump, supposedly, and may have committed treason. He actually took words and made it up. And number five, that the Justice Department has already looked at this and decided that no crime was committed at all. Okay, there's a lot there. Quid pro quo, the whistleblower, the Biden's shift, and that number five, no crime was committed to begin with. Let's go through them one by one, starting with the quid pro quo. You and I touched on this last week. What is the argument there?

So the idea is that in Trump's call on July 25th with the Ukrainian president, it's very clear from the quasi transcript released by the White House that they did discuss aid to Ukraine and then they discussed investigations into Biden that Trump wanted, but that there was no direct promise or quid pro quo, and that therefore that was totally fine. That one was not being offered in exchange for the other. One example where this talking point really fell flat was on 60 Minutes Sunday night. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was being interviewed by Scott Pelley. What do you make of this exchange? President Zelensky says we are almost ready to buy more javelins from the United States for defense purposes.

And President Trump replies, I would like you to do us a favor, though. You just added another word. No, it's in the transcript. You said, I'd like you to do a favor, though? Yes, it's in the White House transcript. How'd that go for Kevin? Not so great, but he quickly moved on to the next talking point. So the argument here is just because Trump never said,

listen, I'm only going to give you military aid if you do this investigation. There is no quid pro quo. Exactly. You know, one thing this brings to mind is how Michael Cohen testified earlier this year, and he talked about how the way Trump does business behind the scenes and does his kind of shady dealings is that he never makes it explicit. He doesn't give you questions. He doesn't give you orders. He speaks in a code. And I understand the code because I've been around him for a decade. It's always implied, but you understand what he's talking about.

And that seems to be both in this phone call and more broadly with the pattern of conduct the whistleblower alleges, that seems to be what was going on here, that Trump was sending a message, making it very clear to the Ukrainians that he wanted these investigations. And it certainly seemed that this nearly $400 million in military aid for Ukraine would depend on this being offered. But Trump's defense is essentially, if I didn't say, I would like to offer you a quid pro quo, then there was no quid pro quo. So there was never explicit enough a quid pro quo for President Trump or his Republican lawmakers who are defending him. What about the actual whistleblower? There's been a lot of focus on the whistleblower and his or her legitimacy. What do we know there?

So probably the biggest talking point that's been used against the whistleblower is that he or she only presented hearsay or secondhand information. I can't believe we're talking about impeaching the president based on an accusation based on hearsay. The problem with this talking point is that the whistleblower's information was quite good. The description of the Trump-Zelensky phone call that is in the whistleblower complaint matches extremely closely, almost exactly the actual White House quasi-transcript that was released last week. And various other claims that were made in the whistleblower complaint, things that the whistleblower heard from other people in the administration, have also checked out to be true. The hearsay complaint doesn't really make sense because we have now had other sources about this stuff and the whistleblower's accusations have been in large part substantiated. Another point related to this is that Trump and his defenders have also been claiming that

the rules for whistleblower complaints were suddenly and mysteriously changed just last month. What's going on here? Why did they change the rules about a whistleblower you can use hearsay when you could not just weeks before the complaint? That is just not true at all. It's based on a misunderstanding of documents posted on the inspector general's website. There was a certain change to the particular options in one document, but there was no secret change to the laws or the rules about how whistleblower complaints function in recent weeks or months. I guess the third talking point that you brought up and the strategy here that we're most familiar with is to say, I didn't do anything wrong. The Democrats did. And in this case, the Democrats are Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, saying the real investigation here should be on the Bidens. Is there anybody that believes that Ukraine or China were paying for Hunter Biden's expertise? Or do you have the common sense to realize

they were buying Joe Biden's office? You know, Hunter Biden, I don't think anyone has looked at the situation of his work in Ukraine and said, this is perfectly above board and there's nothing at all queasy about this. It does look weird. Hunter had had a history of doing lobbying or highly paid consulting for foreign clients while his dad was a prominent senator and then a vice president. A lot of people just seemed like they would hand him large sums of money without him really providing any relevant skills or business expertise. As we established on the show last week, he's a bit of a shady character. Yeah. And we should also, of course, keep in mind that when you're assessing how genuine Trump's professed outrage over this is, we should keep in mind that Trump himself is regularly accepting payments from a lot of foreign sources to his company, the Trump Organization, while he is president.

And so are the Trump children. So, you know, it's a little hard to take Trump's own supposed concerns about this seriously. Right. Trumps are also shady characters. But where things really get dubious is the claim that Joe Biden took action he told the Ukrainians, this guy's got to go or you won't get the money. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money. Oh, son of a bitch. Got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid. And Trump claims that this shows the corruption of Biden. But it doesn't show anything of the case because this prosecutor general was widely believed himself to be completely ineffective.

And that's the reason why so many Western officials wanted him gone. It wasn't to protect a Ukrainian natural gas company that employed Hunter Biden, or at least there's no evidence of that at this time. Now, more recently, it feels like Adam Schiff has been drawn into this sort of the real traitor situation. What's going on with Adam Schiff? So Trump tweeted on Monday morning, Representative Adam Schiff. So Trump tweeted on Monday morning, Representative Adam Schiff illegally made up a fake and terrible statement, pretended it to be mine. Arrest for treason? Question mark. And then you had Adam Schiff, who even worse, made up my words, which I think is just a horrible, I've never even seen a thing like that. This is in reference to how exactly Adam Schiff opened up the testimony of DNI Joseph Maguire last week?

Yeah, so in Schiff's opening statement, Schiff read out, We've been very good to your country, very good. No other country has done as much as we have. But you know what? I don't see much reciprocity here. I hear what you want. I have a favor I want from you, though. And I'm going to say this only seven times,

so you better listen good. I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand lots of it. On this and on that, I'm going to put you in touch with people, not just any people. Of course, President Trump didn't actually say that or actually even come anywhere close to saying exactly that. Well, yes, but Schiff said, in

essence, what President Trump communicates is this. Schiff wasn't claiming to be quoting Trump directly. He was paraphrasing and, you know, summing up what he interpreted Trump's clear message to be. Republicans in that very moment at the testimony already sort of glommed on to Schiff's flowery interpretation of what was in the transcript, right? Yeah, they said it was over the top and they criticized it then. But I don't think anyone could have dreamed that the president would call for the arrest of the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee for treason for making a flowery opening statement. But that is apparently where we are. The final claim here, Andrew, is that the Justice Department already investigated the whistleblower complaint and found there was no crime committed. Is that true? So what they're referring to is that the whistleblower complaint was filed with the inspector general for the intelligence community.

That IG determined it was credible and a matter of urgent concern. And then what happened is that the IG sent a criminal referral over to the Justice Department. That is basically telling them there may have been a crime committed here and you should look into it. And so the Justice Department did look into it a little. looked at whether Trump broke campaign finance law by soliciting a thing of value for his 2020 campaign, the Biden investigation from a foreign source. And in September, they decided there was no need for a full criminal investigation of Trump on this topic because the value of an investigation of Biden couldn't be quantified. So in a sense, what Trump's allies are saying is technically correct that the Justice Department did look at this and conclude there was

no crime. The question of whether that was a politicized decision made to defend or protect the president is, of course, not so clear. So we've got the quid pro quo. We've got disputes about the whistleblower's report and the whistleblower's motivations. We've got this real crime was committed by the Bidens. We've got the supposed treason from Adam Schiff. And then the idea that no crime was committed whatsoever to begin with. How are all these talking points playing out?

You know, I think they're struggling a bit. They're finding their footing maybe a bit more than last week, but there's nothing as clear or as clean as no collusion, which was, of course, Trump's famous line in the Mueller investigation. Because in this case, Trump really did press the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden. That much is clear, according to the supposed transcript released by the White House itself. So they're throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. And right now, it doesn't seem like too much is sticking. The first round of polls that have come in since all this has broke shows that support for impeachment has risen.

And it's very clear that Trump and Republicans are on the defensive. And what comes next is not so clear. Okay, so far these talking points aren't really working for President Trump. So what's a president to do? Matthew Iglesias takes a swing at that question after the break on Today Explained. In the middle of our show, I'd like to take a moment to tell you about the great work other shows here at Vox are doing. Specifically something that we don't do. We don't really go for the let's talk to a presidential candidate long-form interview on this show. It doesn't seem to quite gel with the format.

But you can get that thing from Vox. Don't you worry. You can get that thing from Ezra Klein. He did a deep dive into the theory of political change with Mayor Pete Buttigieg. You can get that thing from Kara Swisher, who had a probing and personal conversation with a candidate you may have heard of,

Marianne Williamson. Vox's interviews with these candidates get to the heart of what matters to these candidates and why we should support and maybe not support their runs. To listen to conversations with Pete and Marianne, but also Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, and more, go to vox.com slash 2020podcasts. Again, vox.com slash 2020podcasts. Thank you. Thank you. Matthew Iglesias, host of the Weeds podcast here at Vox. The president of the United States is the de facto leader of the Republican Party.

Where is he leading his party right now? He is leading them on a very aggressive counterattack with no admission of any kind of wrongdoing, no sense of remorse. Somebody is clipping a lot of television news for him and letting him broadcast out segments of all the sort of pro-Trump talking heads that appear everywhere. And you also saw he got very upset. Ed Henry on Fox News delivered some anti-Trump messages. Are you OK with a president asking his counterpart, this is a simple yes or no, to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. Are you okay with that? And then conservative talk radio host Mark Levin,

who was a guest on Fox & Friends that same morning, was very critical of the host, Ed Henry. What dirt are you talking about? The president of the United States, I'm not saying this was illegal, but I'm asking you. And Ed Henry asked Mark Levin. Let me finish, Ed. You have all morning. I have two minutes. It's not an honest

question. The question isn't proven negative. The question is, it's not illegal. It's not immoral. It's not unethical. And if you guys in the media would do your damn job and ask Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, what the hell's going on? Maybe the president wouldn't have to raise the issue. And you can see that how important Fox is to Trump Trump because he then did some kind of Twitter search and he found all kinds of random people tweeting criticisms of Ed Henry and Trump retweeted them. Twenty different people he retweeted. At least one of them seems to be some kind of bot with no followers. One was a satire bot which replaces the word sharks with whatever it is Trump's talking about. Sorry, just to break you up for a second, the president is retweeting parody accounts and bots, basically programmed accounts supporting him.

Yes. I mean, he was really upset that Ed Henry deviated from the kind of pro-Trump script here because you can see how important Fox is to Trump. He doesn't want to live in a world where good conservative Fox viewers are seeing that lots of people have read this memo and it just doesn't say what Republicans are saying that it says. That's a big threat to him. And of course, something that's upsetting him further is that Fox News is not completely towing that line. Not only Ed Henry, but Chris Wallace. The president has the State Department. He's got the CIA. He's got the Pentagon. He's got a number of other agencies. Why did he use three private lawyers to get information on Biden from the

Ukrainian government rather than go through all of the agencies of his government? Two different points. Number one, How about answering my question? John Durham, as you know. Wait a minute. John Durham is investigating something completely different. Stephen, I'm asking you a direct question. Chris Wallace, Shep Smith, and Ed Henry have all sort of deviated from the script. There's been a lot of reporting about tensions inside Fox News.

There was a kind of comical report that said that Paul Ryan, who's now on the Fox board, feels ashamed by Trump, and now he's in a position of powerical report that said that Paul Ryan, who's now on the Fox board, feels ashamed by Trump. And now he's in a position of power to do something about it. Now, I don't want to exaggerate that. I mean, I saw Sean Hannity last night. The president did absolutely nothing wrong. Nothing. The Democrats, the media, they are just outright lying to you again.

I mean, the bulk of Fox programming is like party line Trump stuff. But you did see over the weekend a few kind of cracks in the wall there. It's just another sign. Obviously, there have been a lot of Trump scandals. I think a lot of them are very serious. This is one that seems to be causing more serious political problem for Trump than a lot of other things we've seen. Yeah. Is there a similar fissure within the Republican Party itself? I mean, what you've seen inside the Republican Party is many people aggressively defending Trump, but then a lot of people, particularly senators, sort of not doing anything. You don't see a lot of folks out there sort of aggressively taking it to Trump. Mitt Romney was fairly critical, although he's gone silent. But just the sort of bulk of conservative senators, not just guys like Cory Gardner who are in political difficulties, but, you know, Jerry Moran, senators from Idaho, Todd Young from Indiana.

They're just not really doing or saying anything. They, I think, want to see how this plays out. Could the president take a different tack here at this point? Apologize, my B, let's move on, dot org? Right. I mean, you could imagine a line of defense, right, from particularly from Republicans in Congress that are saying, look, like, I agree. I wish the president hadn't said that on the phone. But at the end of the day, the military aid to Ukraine did start flowing and it's fine.

Democrats are the ones blowing this out of proportion. Impeachment is going much too far. That's not Trump's style to apologize. But were he to do that, I think it would make space for a lot more Republicans to defend him. But is it too late for that at this point where he's accusing his political rivals of treason and asking for them to be arrested? I mean, you never know with Trump. It's not like him to apologize. I will note that at his probably weakest moment,

which is when that Access Hollywood tape came out, he did eventually put forward a sort of grudging apology. I've never said I'm a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I'm not. I've said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more than a decade old video are one of them. Did he say sorry? Yes. I said it. I was wrong. And I apologize. And it wasn't a persuasive apology. He did not display genuine contrition, but it was something that people who wanted him to win the election but did not want to defend that tape could say to themselves, OK, he apologized.

And now I'm going to defend Trump all things considered. That's what he hasn't done right now, right? He's forcing everyone to weigh in on the phone call. And calling a member of Congress guilty of treason on a totally flimsy basis. I mean you can get into the constitutional aspects of this and various other things. But it's not even remotely treason on a totally flimsy basis. I mean, you can get into the constitutional aspects of this and various other things, but it's not even remotely treason. It's like Adam Schiff said some stuff that Trump didn't like. If you take that at all seriously, it's like core dictatorial behavior.

And we're used to not taking Trump that seriously, to saying, you know, this guy, he says all kinds of crazy stuff, but his staff ignores him. But part of what you're seeing with this Ukraine phone call is that Trump's weird stuff does make an impact on policy at the end of the day. I mean, his staff has very sort of conventional Russia hawk views, but Trump got Rudy Giuliani running this kind of shadow foreign policy. He got on the phone with the president of Ukraine. I mean, it matters what the president of the United States thinks and says and does.

And what he's saying is that opposition party members of Congress should be put on trial for treason if they say things he doesn't like, that civil servants who file whistleblower forms and follow the law should be exposed and punished. And it's alarming.